Fear of foxes

Natural History, April, 2002 by Stephan Reebs

As a result of predation by introduced cats and foxes, tammar wallabies are rare on mainland Australia, but plans are afoot to reintroduce them, using individuals from offshore island populations. Foxes and feral cats still roam the mainland, however, and concerns have been raised that the wallabies may not recognize these predators as dangerous. After all, neither the island wallabies nor their evolutionary ancestors were ever exposed to these foreign species. To help the tammars, a team of Australian and American researchers led by Andrea Griffin, of Macquarie University in Sydney, investigated the possibility of teaching them to fear foxes. Housed within enclosures at the university, the wallabies ran away in fear whenever a person entered an enclosure and tried to catch one of them. The researchers decided to take advantage of this response. On four different days, they presented a stuffed fox just moments before the arrival of a net-wielding person; the wallabies learned to associate the appearance of the fox with the person they already feared. A few days later, when the fox was presented on its own, the tammers showed alarm. Control wallabies that had initially seen fox and human separately, rather than simultaneously, appeared more relaxed around the fox later on. And wallabies that learned to fear foxes extended their wariness to cats, even though they had not seen cats before, suggesting that tammars may be able to learn certain general features of predators. ("Learning Specificity in Acquired Predator Recognition," Animal Behaviour 62:3, 2001)

Stephan Reebs is a professor of biology at the Universite de Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada. He is the author of Fish Behavior in the Aquarium and in the Wild, recently published by Cornell University Press.