Abstract
Simple SummaryAs many species go extinct across the world, conservation initiatives seek to protect and boost wildlife populations, including through translocation programmes that involve the movement or release of captive or wild-caught individuals back into areas they have historically occupied. Captive-bred animals to be released into the wild can undergo behavioural testing to determine if the individuals have skills that would aid survival and increase the establishment of new populations. This research illustrates different levels of boldness in red squirrels and suggests selecting animals for release based on their boldness or timidity. Despite working with a low sample size in this pilot study, we observed trends suggesting that selecting individuals based upon a bold/timid scale of personality may improve future releases of red squirrels. By releasing timid animals first, the establishment of a population may be more successful, and this can be followed by releasing bold animals in later releases to enable faster distribution expansion of the population. This could result in improved success rates of restoration programmes, thus, lowering costs, improving the plight of biodiversity, and reducing early deaths of the released wildlife. Thus, we highlight a need for future research and collaboration within the translocation sector to assess personality.Conservation translocations, including reintroductions, are practices that are vital to restoring biodiversity and ecosystem function within conservation schemes globally. Sadly, population translocations have had a poor success rate historically. At a time where biodiversity is constantly decreasing, improving translocation success is vital for future conservation schemes. Often, to improve success, the selection of individuals is based on genetic characteristics and behaviours linked directly to survival. Further development to improve selection is proposed within this paper using animal personality. The study took place opportunistically to test how personality, in particular an animal’s boldness/timidness, may influence a population restoration of red squirrels into the Ogwen Valley, North Wales. Despite frequent translocations, data on how boldness and timidness may affect the establishment of this species are low. Testing was performed on key survival behaviours and boldness/timidness pre-release. This was performed via video data collection and identification of key behaviours that could be used to identify boldness or behaviours that could be linked to reduced fitness once released. Encounters at different distance intervals were monitored post-release via camera trapping to identify if boldness/timidness may change the furthest encounter distance of focal animals away from their release site. Relationships between the period for an individual to reappear post-threat was significantly linked to boldness, with other behavioural results and the encounter distance also showing trends of a potential relationship. Our results indicate that bolder individuals have a higher chance of expressing behavioural traits that will increase exposure to risks and, therefore, reduce the likelihood of successfully establishing populations. However, the small sample size of this study means that further research is needed. We suggest that during early stages of conservation translocation programmes, personality testing for boldness should become common practice, and we recommend selecting timid individuals for an initial release to improve population establishment, with bolder individuals utilised later to expand population distribution.
Highlights
Reintroduction and reinforcement are forms of population restoration that aim to restore populations into areas where species or populations have become extinct, are reduced in number or fragmented [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Local predators that may pose a risk to red squirrels ranged from the common buzzard, Buteo buteo, to the red fox, Vulpes vulpes, which were identified through camera trapping programmes in nearby woodlands in Gwynedd county
Despite the low sample size preventing a direct assessment of boldness and timidness with survival, the individual sighted the latest, nearly 120 days post-release, was the most timid, as seen in (Figure 4)
Summary
Reintroduction and reinforcement are forms of population restoration that aim to restore populations into areas where species or populations have become extinct, are reduced in number or fragmented [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Where in-situ conservation has failed to be successful or repopulation by remnant populations is not possible, the restoration of species through translocation is often the only way to rebuild native species populations, but it should not be used in the place of earlier conservation interventions [9]. This highlights the importance of reinforcement and reintroduction translocations to maintain and increase populations. Returning species and restoring their roles allow ecosystems to regain function and stability, which have been regularly observed when restoring keystone species [9,10]
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