Abstract
For translocated animals, behavioral competence may be key to post-release survival. However, monitoring behavior is typically limited to tracking movements or inferring behavior at a gross scale via collar-mounted sensors. Animal-bourne acoustic monitoring may provide a unique opportunity to monitor behavior at a finer scale. The giant panda is an elusive species of Ursid that is vulnerable to extinction. Translocation is an important aspect of the species’ recovery, and survival and recruitment for pandas likely hinge on behavioral competence. Here we tested the efficacy of a collar-mounted acoustic recording unit (ARU) to remotely monitor the behavior of panda mothers and their dependent young. We found that trained human listeners could reliably identify 10 behaviors from acoustic recordings. Through visual inspection of spectrograms we further identified 5 behavioral categories that may be detectable by automated pattern recognition, an approach that is essential for the practical application of ARU. These results suggest that ARU are a viable method for remotely observing behaviors, including feeding. With targeted effort directed towards instrumentation and computing advances, ARU could be used to document how behavioral competence supports or challenges post-release survival and recruitment, and allow for research findings to be adaptively integrated into future translocation efforts.
Highlights
For translocated animals, behavioral competence can be fundamentally important to post-release survival and recruitment[1]
In the realm of acoustics sensors, these advancements have made the application of acoustic monitoring to ecology and conservation far more feasible and valuable[12,13], with impressive initiatives and results from studies focused on marine species[14] and in the realm of soundscape ecology; a developing field based on the information content and dynamics of sound in natural systems[15]
Animal-bourne acoustic monitoring fundamentally redirects the focus of data from the environment to an individual animal and the sounds that it makes and experiences as it moves through space and over time[20,21]
Summary
Behavioral competence (i.e., the capacity for an individual to engage in behaviors that support reproduction and survival in a range of contexts) can be fundamentally important to post-release survival and recruitment[1]. Incidental sound, which may include byproducts of non-communicative behaviors (e.g., foraging[25] and resting), physical processes (e.g., respiration26) and environmental contexts (e.g., footfalls on different substrates, weather27,28) well compliments the information content of acoustic signals and cues, can provide information on social behavior and context, reproductive status[29], intraspecific competition and heterospecific interactions. These examples demonstrate the value of taking a comprehensive approach to analyzing acoustic recordings. All of these factors can play an important role in assessing and improving management strategies (e.g., restrictions on human use of habitat, and the expression of species typical, and fitness enhancing behaviors of managed individual animals)
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