Many threatened and endangered species inhabit environments where people have altered the landscape and have created novel and powerful selective pressures. These often disrupt “bottom-up” factors associated with resource acquisition, change “top-down” factors involving predation or disease transmission or alter “side-ways” factors involving competitive or mutualistic interactions happening at the same trophic level. Since one of the basic precepts of behavioral ecology is that environmental conditions shape behavior, such changes should lead to changing responses by the species experiencing them. But this pre-supposes that there is enough plasticity in a species’ behavioral repertoire to cope with the environmental change. If there is, then contingent responses displayed in the past may help species cope with a changing present. If the degree of environmental change is so great or the species has a limited ability to adjust its behavior, then the species could be pushed beyond its limits to adapt, with the stress it experiences lowering its fecundity or survival, leading to its demise (Chapter 4). Alternatively, the species could be pushed into new behavioral space, revealing novel responses. These might be sufficient to cope with the environmental changes, creating new evolutionary potential, or they could be pathological, creating unintended negative consequences that may at first appear benign, but in the long run may impact the species’ viability or involve cascading effects on other species.

Recent reviews by Rubenstein (2010) and Caro and Sherman (2011, 2013) have provided insights into many dimensions of this problem. Caro and Sherman (2011) argue that species exhibit remarkable degrees of plasticity and that behavioral diversity per se should be added to the traditional list of attributes to be conserved – genes, species and ecosystems. If behaviors are not conserved, then many behavioral variants will remain latent and unexpressed, and if given enough time, will vanish from a species’ repertoire forever. This could potentially change a species’ evolutionary trajectory by reducing a species’ ability to escape from new stressors or by eliminating the possibility of conservationists seeding threatened populations with corrective behavioral variants. Such a doom and gloom scenario need not be cast in stone since dramatic changes in the past have often disrupted communities and altered selective pressures. Adaptations in the past have led to successful coping strategies and they can do so again going forward.