Ecotourism may not actually be helping the problem it aims to remedy, as a new study found it harmful toward wildlife.
Published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, the new study is a research review of more than 100 studies on ecotourism and its effects to wildlife. In numerous cases, animals changed their natural behavior in ways detrimental to their health.
"This massive amount of nature-based and ecotourism can be added to the long list of drivers of human-induced rapid environmental change," study senior author Daniel Blumstein, a professor and department chair of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a press release.
Ecotourism involves people observing and even interacting with wildlife in their natural environments, and in some cases patrons are encouraged to contribute to conservation funds.
The researchers observed reactions by wild animals similar to urbanization and domestication, which is to say the animals became more familiar with humans and sometimes more docile. In various cases, smaller animals could be less afraid of predators, predators could be discouraged from venturing into areas frequented by tourists, and some behavioral changes became evolutionary traits.
"If individuals selectively habituate to humans - particularly tourists - and if invasive tourism practices enhance this habituation, we might be selecting for or creating traits or syndromes that have unintended consequences, such as increased predation risk," the researchers wrote in the study. "Even a small human-induced perturbation could affect the behavior or population biology of a species and influence the species' function in its community."
