Using culturally transmitted behavior to help delineate conservation units for species at risk

Abstract

Culture (information or behavior acquired by social learning and shared by members of a community) is an inheritance system that that can contribute to the designation of conservation units for species at risk. The phenotypic diversity produced by culture is of intrinsic value and behaviorally-cohesive communities or sets of communities may be suitable candidate conservation units. This paper considers how cultural information can contribute to the designation of conservation units, in particular when assessing the discreteness and/or evolutionarily significance of potential units. Call and song dialects are particularly useful for documenting discreteness, while differences in seasonal migrations, if consistent, can be evolutionarily significant. Distinctions in foraging behavior or diet can suggest discreteness and/or evolutionary significance but it is important to show these are not environmentally driven. Social and play behavior can also be used to show discreteness. In some cases, it may not be clear whether behavioral differences are genetically or culturally determined but this may not matter for the delineation of conservation units if the behavioral distinctions are heritable. Genetic correlations can indicate the stability of culturally-determined behavior when transmission processes are parallel (e.g., mitochondrial DNA and behavior learned from the mother). The explicit use of cultural data in the delineation of conservation units is currently rare, but should increase as more detailed and extensive behavioral databases are compiled and analytical methods are developed.