Effects of antipredator training, environmental enrichment, and soft release on wildlife translocations: A review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Wildlife translocations can have conservation value but results have been mixed regarding animal behavior and survival post-release. Practitioners have adopted antipredator training, environmental enrichment, and soft release as pre-release conditioning tactics to encourage adaptive behavior and improve post-release survival, but their utility has not been broadly quantified. We performed a formal literature review and conducted meta-analysis on 108 effects from 41 studies experimentally testing how these tactics affected survival, movement, or site fidelity compared to unconditioned animals. We further investigated how each conditioning tactic, animal source (wild-to-wild translocated or captive-released), age, and taxonomic group (birds, fish, mammals, and reptiles) influenced outcomes. Relative to unconditioned animals, conditioned individuals were 1.5 times more likely to survive, had reduced movement, and were three times more likely to show site fidelity. Each of the three conditioning tactics resulted in improved survival. Juveniles released from captivity derived the greatest survival benefit from conditioning. Across taxa, conditioning most benefitted survival of fish. Conditioning also had positive effects on survival of mammals and reptiles, albeit with less certainty than for fish. Estimates comparing survival of conditioned to unconditioned birds were much more variable, suggesting avian translocation programs using conditioning generally need improvement. Soft release consistently reduced movement and increased site fidelity; this was an especially viable technique for adult wild-to-wild translocated animals. We provide quantitative evidence that behavioral conditioning can aid wildlife translocations, and we encourage continued experiments to further elucidate how refined tactics could advance conservation efforts using translocation as a management tool.