Science - USA (2020-08-21)

SCIENCE sciencemag.org 28 AUGUST 2020 • VOL 369 ISSUE 6506 893

PHOTO: AP PHOTO/ODED BALILTY

A

fter a COVID-19 lockdown earlier this

year prevented biologist Eduardo

Silva-Rodríguez from visiting his field

sites in rural Chile, he moved his re-

search closer to home. He and other

Chilean researchers set up automated

cameras to monitor wildlife in urban settings,

including on his own campus at the Austral

University of Chile, Isla Teja. The cameras

soon captured surprises: rare animals, in-

cluding endangered southern river otters and

a wild cat called the güiña, roaming through

pandemic-quieted cities where they’d never

been documented before.

The snapshots are just one ex-

ample of how wildlife is responding

to what scientists are calling the

“anthropause”—the dramatic slow-

down in human activity caused

by the pandemic. Some research-

ers are tracking how animals and

ecosystems are reacting to steep

declines in tourism. Others are

pooling data on animal movements

to probe large-scale responses to

emptier roads and airports. The

unique natural experiment is al-

lowing scientists to compare how

animals behaved before, during,

and after the pandemic—and per-

haps glean insights into how to

better protect wildlife once human

activity resumes full speed. “The lockdown

has given us the capacity to find where we

can optimize conservation,” says Amanda

Bates, an ecologist at Memorial University.

In one collaboration led by the Interna-

tional Bio-Logging Society, researchers are

contributing tracking data collected by satel-

lite tags, radio collars, and other tools from

some 180 species of birds, mammals, reptiles,

and fish from all continents and oceans.

“There is a gold mine of data,” says ecologist

Christian Rutz of the University of St. An-

drews. Among other things, researchers will

be investigating whether animals changed

their movements during the anthropause—

crossing roads more frequently, for example,

or venturing out at unusual times of day.

A separate team of 16 researchers, orga-

nized by conservation biologist Nicola Koper

at the University of Manitoba, is exploring

similar questions for 85 bird species in Can-

ada and the United States. Working with data

from eBird, a citizen science project run by

the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the research-

ers are examining bird communities in

95 U.S. and Canadian counties. They wonder,

for example, whether species that don’t like

noise, such as yellow-rumped warblers, be-

came more abundant around airports. And

they are checking whether low-flying species

became more common near roads, suggest-

ing fewer were dying in collisions with cars.

At popular destinations such as national

parks, the tourism standstill has created re-

search opportunities. In Ecuador’s Galápa-

gos Marine Reserve, the decline in visitors

has been “unlike anything that would ever

happen, short of a world war,” says ecologist

Jon Witman of Brown University. He and his

colleagues are studying, among other things,

whether shy marine fish become bolder now

that recreational divers aren’t around, a be-

havioral change that could alter how the eco-

system functions. Witman is heading to the

Galápagos this week: “We’re chasing a fleet-

ing moment,” he says.

In the Bahamas, researchers are examining

how the tourism crash is affecting critically

endangered rock iguanas. Visitors routinely

feed the iguanas bread, meat, fruit, and vege-

tables; now the change in diet “could have re-

ally profound effects,” says Susannah French,

a physiological ecologist at Utah State Uni-

versity. Researchers hope to sail to the Baha-

mas soon to weigh the animals, take blood

samples, and check their gut microbiota. The

data could help local officials better manage

tourists once they return, says Chuck Knapp,

a biologist at the Shedd Aquarium.

In the Society Islands of French Polynesia,

researchers are probing how coral reefs are

faring now that hotels have gone dark. On

one hand, local residents appear to be re-

turning to subsistence fishing to make ends

meet. That could mean trouble for reefs by

removing herbivorous fish, which control

algae that can blanket and kill coral. But

empty hotels could help reefs if it means less

nutrient pollution from wastewater, which

stimulates algae growth. It’s “a once-in-a-

lifetime opportunity to better understand the

links between humans and coral reefs,” says

ecologist Sally Holbrook of the University of

California (UC), Santa Barbara, who works at

the Moorea Coral Reef Long Term

Ecological Research site.

In Italy, ecologist Francesca

Cagnacci also got a rare chance

to see how the absence of moun-

tain bikers, hunters, and traffic

affected wildlife in the forests

surrounding Trentino, where she

is tracking deer and other ani-

mals with radio collars. In March,

Cagnacci saw something very un-

usual in the hushed woods: deer

and birds wandering during day-

light. “I won’t forget this for my en-

tire life,” says Cagnacci, who works

at the Edmund Mach Foundation’s

Research and Innovation Centre.

The anthropause has quieted the

oceans, too. In California’s Mon-

terey Bay, marine ecologist Ari Friedlaender

of UC Santa Cruz took to the water with col-

leagues in March and early April, when lock-

downs reduced boat traffic. Equipped with a

crossbow and special arrows, they collected

blubber samples from 45 humpback whales.

When they can return to the lab, they’ll mea-

sure levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. They

plan to collect new samples over the next

year, when boat traffic is expected to pick up,

in an effort to discover just how much addi-

tional stress—if any—the vessel noise creates

for whales.

Scientists acknowledge that the oppor-

tunity to study the anthropause is coming

at the expense of much human death and

suffering. “It’s our sincere hope that no

one ever gets a chance to study this again,”

Witman says. “But incredible things are

happening in natural ecosystems.” j

With reporting by Rasha Aridi.

COVID-

By Erik Stokstad

Pandemic lockdown stirs up ecological research

Biologists launch studies of how wildlife around the world responded to the “anthropause”

Normally timid jackals wandered in Tel Aviv, Israel, during an April lockdown.

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