RAPID: COVID-19 induced cessation of ecotourism and supplemental feeding: Implications for wildlife physiology, reproduction, and the microbiome

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Wildlife feeding by tourists is a widespread phenomenon across various species and environments. While it can provide important economic benefits to countries and local communities, it also poses significant challenges for affected wildlife. These widespread practices may induce habituation, cause stress, impact health, and alter growth and survival, all of which can lead to population changes. However, the ability to control for extraneous factors in tourism-related wildlife feeding conditions is often difficult if not impossible, rendering scientific study challenging. Furthermore, the effects of termination of wildlife feeding have rarely been considered. The unprecedented cessation of tourism and food provisioning due to the COVID-19 global pandemic has created a natural experiment that meets the aforementioned challenges to directly test the effects of this phenomenon on critically endangered rock iguanas in The Bahamas. The proposed work will leverage this unique opportunity to test the effects of widescale resource restriction and dietary change on the health of free-living animals. The implications of this work reach far beyond that of the tourist sector and can inform the effects of resource restriction for natural populations across species on a broader scale. Thus, understanding the consequences of supplemental feeding cessation will help inform countries on a broader scale that are working at making tourism practices more sustainable, which is particularly important for endangered species. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a unique situation via the restriction of human movement and contact resulting in severely reduced global travel. As a result, in countries like The Bahamas, there has been the complete removal of tourist stress and feeding pressures on wildlife across the country. Recent findings by the PIs examining critically endangered iguanas across an insular landscape in The Bahamas have illustrated significant tourist-driven effects on physiology and gut microbial composition. This work has also revealed significant associations among tourism, bacterial abundance, and physiology. The recent and sudden release from supplemental feeding by tourists has created a rare natural experiment by which the PIs can directly test the effects of diet shifts and restriction in natural populations of long-lived iguanas where pre-pandemic data are already available. The PIs will specifically focus on the gut microbiome, and test for direct associations and directionality with physiological systems important to health and survival. Moreover, the ongoing 40-year demographic study in this system will allow the PIs to relate this to survival, growth, and recruitment at the population level. The research group will work to facilitate transfer of results from this study to The Bahamas via long standing research partnerships and will provide opportunistic clarity on potential management strategies moving forward. To reach the broader community, outcomes will also be reported via Shedd Aquarium media and exhibits.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.