"Don't incur any amount of undue stress on the animal"

Nature Talk
19

  1. In one study of grouse, human disturbance was associated with a possible increase of >10% energy expenditure. For animals at the edge of their range, already stressed due to lack of food or inappropriate terrain/climate, this can be a significant expenditure that could lead to death by many means, including capture by predators that would not otherwise occur.

  2. Even excluding non-lethal effects (which are possible for particularly sensitive animals!), such as decreasing fat reserves through stress-associated energy expenditure could have significant associated fitness costs, including decreases in mating, brood/litter size, and slower growth rates.

  3. Just because stress effects on animals may seem negligible from your perspective doesn’t mean they are not. This is why, at least in the U.S., handling is regulated in terms of ‘take’ since stress does impact wild species’ fitness and population viability. Imagine if a creature 10-1000 times your size picked you up while you were out on a hike or eating lunch?

3.1) 50% of surveyed outdoor recreationists believed they had NO impact on wildlife, even though this is demonstrably not the case.

  1. Ignoring all these effects, amphibians can be impacted by spread of spread of, for example, of deadly chytrid fungus, and we can even be impacted by handling of lizards and pangolins by nasty microbes like salmonella.

I personally have handled endangered and non-protected animal species in educational context with a permit holder, and generally avoid or reduce handling species as much as possible and try to balance that with documenting animals. As I have learned more about the effects of human-induced stress on animals by handling/pursuit, I now lean more and more toward reducing handling as much as possible and settling for lower quality pictures over stressing the animal.

Since hiking near animals can disturb them, it’s a curious question to ask whether hiking near an animal (again different animals have wildly different responses to human disturbance/handling) has an additive impact to handling them, or whether they’re on the same scale…

It’s a very interesting topic you’ve brought up, and I think it is a constructive conversation to have! Recreation ecology for example is a field I didn’t know about until some google scholar searches related to your post!

Grouse flushing and energy expenditure: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1890/14-1141.1

Recreation impacts on wildlife: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1890/1051-0761(2003)13[951%3AWRTRAA]2.0.CO%3B2

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