Less charismatic animals are more likely to be “road killed”: human attitudes towards small animals in Brazilian roads

Biotemas

Paulo C. M. D. Mesquita¹  George Lucas Sá Polidoro¹  Victor Mendes Lipinski¹ 

[1] Laboratório de Herpetologia, Departamento de Biologia, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. Avenida Roraima, 1000. CEP 97105-900, Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil;

关键词: Conflicts with wildlife;    Conservation;    Road ecology;    Snakes;    Spiders;   

DOI  :  10.5007/2175-7925.2015v28n1p85

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Roads are long and intermittent sources of wildlife loss due to their indirect effects, such as fragmentation of habitat, or their direct effects, such as constant mortality by run-over. Thus, some studies indicate that a portion of these run-over incidents may be intentional and could be avoided. We investigated whether various groups of small animals had different run-over rates and how “charisma” affects the survival chances of an animal on the roads. During our experiment, we quantified run-over rates for models of spiders, snakes, chicks, and tree leaves (control) on three roads with different traffic volumes. We found out that snakes and spiders were consistently ran over with a higher frequency than chicks and leaves. We also observed that chicks were the only models rescued by human beings. We concluded that the survival chances of chicks are the highest among the models tested and this is due to the charismatic value attributed to them by human beings, when compared to snakes and spiders. We suggest the broadcasting of campaigns in the media to increase public awareness regarding wildlife conservation as a useful tool to solve the problem of intentional run over of small animals.

【 授权许可】

Unknown