Tough Love

- John Yeld

The research was recently published in the journal Current Biology. The article’s lead author is Richard Sherley of the University of Exeter in the UK and an associate of UCT’s Animal Demography Unit (ADU). One of his co-authors is Les Underhill, the retired director of the ADU and now a UCT senior scholar who conceptualised the research with Sherley.

The researchers explain that environmental degradation can cause ‘maladaptive habitat selection’, particularly by long-lived species, thereby inducing what scientists call ecological traps from which animals are unable to escape and in turn have profound negative consequences for biodiversity. They theorised that one such a trap could be operating in the Benguela ecosystem that has been severely degraded by over-fishing, and also by the apparent impacts of climate change.