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Flight-initiation response reflects short- and long-term human visits to remote islets

journal contribution
posted on 2020-07-01, 00:00 authored by M Thibault, Mike WestonMike Weston, A Ravache, E Vidal
The increasing use of, and visits to, isolated territories by people (especially tourists) enables the investigation of how biodiversity reacts to evolutionarily novel pressures. We explored the behavioural reaction of a breeding seabird species, the Brown Noddy Anous stolidus, to our repeated visits at two study sites in the Chesterfield Islands, a newly classified reserve in the Coral Sea Natural Park. Repeated measures of flight-initiation distances (FIDs) at three sites and over time suggest that human visitations induced both a spatial phenotypical sorting or learning of individuals and a temporal habituation. In light of the novel ‘Sit and Defend’ mode of avian nest defence, the study finally provides the first dataset of FIDs for this species, and highlights management opportunities that could arise from the replication of such an approach to other breeding seabirds and therefore the conservation of remote island ecosystems.

History

Journal

Ibis

Volume

162

Issue

3

Pagination

1082 - 1087

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons

Location

Chichester, Eng.

ISSN

0019-1019

eISSN

1474-919X

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal