Variation in individual elk behavioural syndromes, and management applications to problems of habituation and loss of migration.

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When animals are attracted to human-habitated areas they may desensitize to humans and become habituated to human presence and infrastructure. Wildlife habituation is a growing global concern, as megafauna such as bears, elephants, and ungulates, have proportionately large impacts on local ecology. Habituated wildlife can also pose safety risks to humans via attacks, or by the predators they attract. A potential consequence of habituation in ungulates is a loss of migratory behaviour, and subsequent local over-herbivory and perturbed predator-prey dynamics. Wildlife managers around the world are under increasing pressure to solve issues of habituated wildlife without using traditional lethal techniques. A promising alternative is aversive conditioning, which trains animals to avoid humans. Unfortunately, some individuals do not respond to treatment, potentially due to variation in behavioural syndromes (personality), which are frequently described along a bold-shy continuum. Despite the potential management implications, individual behavioural variation has not been studied in any wild ungulate species. I will conduct an extensive series of behavioural assays, including measures of novel object exploration, problem solving, and lateralization, to classify behavioural variation among vs. within individual elk. I will then explore the implications of behavioural variation by comparing behavioural types found in migratory vs. non-migratory wild elk, and in wild vs. captive elk. Using captive elk of known pedigrees and histories, I will examine the contributions of heredity, development, and experience. Finally, I will determine the efficacy of aversive conditioning that targets bold or shy behavioural types with different conditioning intensities. This work will provide tangible tools for the management of habituated elk in North America, that may be generalized to other species and locations to improve humans and wildlife coexistence in an increasingly crowded world.