“Can You Save One Species by Annoying Another?”
Conservation biologist Tim Shields is trying to save the Mojave Desert’s desert tortoise population, which is under threat from ravens, an invasive species brought to the area by habitat-encroaching humans. Working with an engineer, he’s trying to train the ravens to leave the tortoises alone — their work is the subject of the short documentary Eco-Hack!
Together, they embarked on what Shields calls a campaign of “aversive training” for ravens, which, among the various threats to desert tortoises, he says seemed like the easiest to address. They set about booby-trapping the desert to train the birds to leave the tortoises alone. Their methods seem like a sophisticated version of sitting in the driveway and burning ants with a magnifying glass: placing laser emitters on terrestrial rovers; building and deploying 3-D-printed fake tortoises laced with artificial grape flavoring, which ravens evidently hate. They give their creations proud retro names: the Techno-Tort, the Blastoluxe. “The idea is just to make the haunted landscape where there’s just no relief from the surprises, and all the surprises are bad,” Shields says of the ravens, one of the collective nouns for which is, fittingly, an “unkindness.”
Amazing image at the 10:35 mark of the video btw.
Comments 3
This approach of training a species for aversion is also being used in Australia. Though perhaps in the reverse, here the species under threat, bandicoots, are being trained to dislike truffles in the hopes that truffle farmers will not lose $$ or feel the need to cull the bandicoots!
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/the-bandicoot-bandits-causing-a-truffle-kerfuffle-20240806-p5jzyv.html
That was an outstanding documentary! Clear, well-shot and edited, and they were very fortunate to have a principle that had a sense of humor and perspective. I loved his analogy to the cathedral builders.
(For whatever reason New Yorker or YouTube is not letting the video be viewable for me until VPN'ing to the US... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQis4fQuUYw)
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