IJEE Soapbox: The Unraveling of Nature's Information Webs: The Next Depresing Frontier in Conservation?

Abstract

After a lengthy transoceanic flight, you have arrived in a large city in a land that you have never visited, and even though it is late, you want to stretch your legs. After plotting an itinerary on the hotel tourist map, your walk first takes you through a lively, colorful, crowded urban environment. Then you turn a corner, and peer down a street, where no one is walking, as far as you can see, under the lonely streetlights. What do you do? Well, I know what I would likely do, which is shift my itinerary, map or no map, and not go down that deserted lane. What I have done is use a kind of behavioral indicator— the presence or absence of my conspecifics at a particular place, when I know there are conspecifics nearby—as an indirect source of information about the local environment. Maybe there has been a recent unpleasant incident, or maybe the neighborhood just has a bad reputation for late-night shenanigans. Whatever it is, I do not want any part of it. We humans do this all the time. The excellent set of papers in this special issue on behavioral indicators highlights how we as scientists can monitor the behaviors of individuals of other species to make inferences about the habitat quality they experience. By assuming that behavior is adaptive, and then recognizing that adaptation is always a joint function of the phenotype and the environment, we can carry out a kind of inverse optimality reasoning and make inferences about the environment from the behaviors we observe. And of course, if we can watch a swan bobbing its head and learn something about that swan’s immediate environment (see Nolet et al., 2007, this issue), so can other swans, who doubtless on average watch each other more keenly and with greater perception than does even the most avid birder or skilled avian ecologist. Information reduces uncertainty. From an evolutionary perspective, information also involves utility—it leads to actions that impact fitness (Dall et al., 2005). A broad and important emergent unifying theme at the interface of behavior and ecology is that animals use behavioral indicators provided by other animals to make decisions with fitness