Understanding animal movement is essential to elucidate how animals interact, survive, and thrive in a changing world. Recent technological advances in data collection and management have transformed our understanding of animal “movement ecology” (the integrated study of organismal movement), creating a big-data discipline that benefits from rapid, cost-effective generation of large amounts of data on movements of animals in the wild. These high-throughput wildlife tracking systems now allow more thorough investigation of variation among individuals and species across space and time, the nature of biological interactions, and behavioral responses to the environment. Movement ecology is rapidly expanding scientific frontiers through large interdisciplinary and collaborative frameworks, providing improved opportunities for conservation and insights into the movements of wild animals, and their causes and consequences.
Human exploitation of wild‐living animals has been suggested to create a ‘landscape of fear’. A consequence could be that individuals surviving intensive harvesting, either as a result of behavioural plasticity and/or evolutionary change, exhibit increased average timidity. In the aquatic world, such effects are particularly well documented in passively operated fishing gears common to many commercial and recreational fisheries, such as angling, trapping or gill netting. We thus propose that an exploitation‐induced timidity syndrome should be a widespread pattern in fisheries. Importantly, we argue that the syndrome can be associated with several ecological and managerial consequences for social groups, populations, food webs, fisheries and assessment of stocks. We suggest research priorities to deepen our understanding of how exploited fish populations behaviourally respond to harvesting.
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