Vera Pfannerstill, Niko Balkenhol, Emily Bennitt, Onkgopotse Somalia Maboga, Marina Scheumann

Assessing the potential of conspecific playbacks as a post‐translocation management tool for white rhinoceros

  • Nature and Landscape Conservation
  • Environmental Science (miscellaneous)
  • Ecology
  • Global and Planetary Change
Save to CiteDrive Show PDF

AbstractTranslocations can be a useful management tool to support endangered species. Translocated white rhinoceroses sometimes disperse from their release sites and leave protected areas, requiring sedation and return transport by vehicles. To avoid stressful transportation, less invasive management tools are needed to get animals back to the release site. We tested whether playbacks of white rhinoceros calls can influence their movements and thereby offer a potential management tool. We performed 200 experiments with 26 free‐roaming white rhinoceroses in two reserves in Botswana and recorded response intensity and duration, including body movement toward and away from the loudspeaker in response to a socio‐positive and a socio‐negative call. Rhinoceroses responded more to conspecific calls than to control sounds but did not show consistent behavioral responses across all experiments per call type. Males approached the loudspeaker more often than females. The intensity of responses was higher for calls recorded from unfamiliar than from familiar callers and behavioral responses differed between reserves. Further research is necessary to develop an applicable design for a combination of playbacks that would more reliably lead to directed body movement responses.

Need a simple solution for managing your BibTeX entries? Explore CiteDrive!

  • Web-based, modern reference management
  • Collaborate and share with fellow researchers
  • Integration with Overleaf
  • Comprehensive BibTeX/BibLaTeX support
  • Save articles and websites directly from your browser
  • Search for new articles from a database of tens of millions of references
Try out CiteDrive

More from our Archive