Music Festival Makes Hedgehogs Move: How Individuals Cope Behaviorally in Response to Human-Induced Stressors

Abstract

Understanding the impact of human activities on wildlife behavior and fitness can improve their sustainability. In a pilot study, we wanted to identify behavioral responses to anthropogenic stress in an urban species during a semi-experimental field study. We equipped eight urban hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus; four per sex) with bio-loggers to record their behavior before and during a mega music festival (2 × 19 days) in Treptower Park, Berlin. We used GPS (Global Positioning System) to monitor spatial behavior, VHF (Very High Frequency)-loggers to quantify daily nest utilization, and accelerometers to distinguish between different behaviors at a high resolution and to calculate daily disturbance (using Degrees of Functional Coupling). The hedgehogs showed clear behavioral differences between the pre-festival and festival phases. We found evidence supporting highly individual strategies, varying between spatial and temporal evasion of the disturbance. Averaging the responses of the individual animals or only examining one behavioral parameter masked these potentially different individual coping strategies. Using a meaningful combination of different minimal-invasive bio-logger types, we were able to show high inter-individual behavioral variance of urban hedgehogs in response to an anthropogenic disturbance, which might be a precondition to persist successfully in urban environments.

Moving in the Dark—Evidence for an Influence of Artificial Light at Night on the Movement Behaviour of European Hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus)

“…This behavioural pattern was observed regardless of the animal's sex. This finding indicates a certain behavioural stability of ALAN avoidance in hedgehogs, which is interesting given that significant interindividual differences in movement behaviour of hedgehogs were observed in response to a music festival in a park in Berlin [48]. Despite the overall preference for movement in less strongly illuminated areas, comparison of movement behaviour in relation to ALAN between the three study locations indicated that hedgehogs living in TE differed in their behaviour compared to the hedgehogs living in TP and TR.…”

Patterns of Feeding by Householders Affect Activity of Hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) during the Hibernation Period

“…For example, in addition to potential nesting sites in patches of remnant natural or semi-natural vegetation, hedgehogs can access cavities beneath buildings, gardens sheds, or decking within residential gardens; urban residents may also supply artificial refugia in the form of homemade or commercially available “hedgehog houses” [ 7 , 31 ]. However, within each of these habitats/locations, hedgehogs are exposed to different levels of disturbance from humans or companion animals [ 39 , 40 ], road traffic [ 19 ], and artificial light [ 41 ] and sound. Similarly, temperatures within different microhabitats are likely to vary in relation to, for example, the density and composition of surrounding buildings and associated structures [ 31 , 42 ].…”

Urban Hedgehog Behavioural Responses to Temporary Habitat Disturbance versus Permanent Fragmentation

“…In terms of behaviour parameters, there was no obvious general pattern as to how hedgehogs responded to different disturbances. Such high inter-individual behavioural variance in response to anthropogenic disturbance is an expression of behavioural flexibility and may contribute to successfully persist in challenging environments such as big cities [ 54 ]. However, behavioural flexibility also has the evolutionary cost that a chosen behavioural response may be inappropriate in that situation [ 79 ], and these are more likely if the anthropogenic disturbance is unequal to natural disturbances to which there may be an evolved response [ 41 ].…”

“…The train and test dataset for the behaviour recognition were taken from a previous study. The whole procedure is described in [ 54 ]. By joining multiple Support Vector Machines (SVM), the selected behaviours were classified.…”