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Abstract Ecotourism provides an opportunity to experience nature that may promote its conservation. Ecotourists photograph wildlife, and photography plays an important role in focusing public's attention on nature. Although photography is believed to be a low‐impact activity, how the visual stimulus of cameras influences wildlife remains unknown. Since animals are known to fear eyes pointed towards them because of similarity to predator eyes, we predicted that cameras with zoom lens would increase vigilance. Using yellow‐bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer) and adopting a behavioural approach to identify marmots' response to photography, we experimentally quantified proportion of time allocated to vigilance during foraging and flight initiation distance (FID, the distance at which a marmot started to flee from an approaching human) towards humans with and without a camera. We focused on time allocated to vigilance measured in three ways: the proportion of time when marmots moved their head and body towards observers (looking towards observer), the proportion of time when marmots moved their head away from observers (looking away from observer) and the total vigilance (sum of looking towards and away from observer). While a camera was pointed at a marmot, individuals allocated more time to looking towards the observer and less time to looking away from the observer than they did without a camera. However, the total proportion of time allocated to vigilance was not different when marmots were approached by humans with and without a camera. Additionally, whether or not an observer was carrying a camera had no effect on FID. Our results indicated that cameras distracted marmots but did not influence their subsequent risk assessment; marmots may be curious about cameras but were not threatened by them. However, capturing an individual's attention may reduce their ability to look out for predators and thus may increase vulnerability to predation. Regulating photography in locations where predation risk is high or vulnerable species ranges' overlap with humans may be required. 

Multidisciplinary approaches to conservation and wildlife management are often e ective in addressing complex, multi-factor problems. Emerging elds such as conservation physiology and conservation behaviour can provide innovative solutions and management strategies for target species and systems. Sensory ecology combines the study of ‘how animals acquire’ and process sensory stimuli from their environments, and the ecological and evolutionary signi cance of ‘how animals respond’ to this information. We review the bene ts that sensory ecology can bring to wildlife conservation and management by discussing case studies across major taxa and sensory modalities. Conservation practices informed by a sensory ecology approach include the amelioration of sensory traps, control of invasive species, reduction of human–wildlife con icts and relocation and establishment of new populations of endangered species. We illustrate that sensory ecology can facilitate the understanding of mechanistic ecological and physiological explanations underlying particular conservation issues and also can help develop innovative solutions to ameliorate conservation problems. 

In many vertebrates, the brain’s right hemisphere which is connected to the left visual field specializes in the processing of information about threats while the left hemisphere which is connected to the right visual field specializes in the processing of information about conspecifics. This is referred to as hemispheric lateralization. But individuals that are too predictable in their response to predators could have reduced survival and we may expect selection for somewhat unpredictable responses. We studied hemispheric lateralization in yellow-bellied marmots Marmota flaviventer, a social rodent that falls prey to a variety of terrestrial and aerial predators. We first asked if they have lateralized responses to a predatory threat. We then asked if the eye that they used to assess risk influenced their perceptions of risk. We recorded the direction marmots were initially looking and then walked toward them until they fled. We recorded the distance that they responded to our experimental approach by looking, the eye with which they looked at us, and the distance at which they fled (i.e., flight initiation distance; FID). We found that marmots had no eye preference with which they looked at an approaching threat. Furthermore, the population was not comprised of individuals that responded in consistent ways. However, we found that marmots that looked at the approaching person with their left eye had larger FIDs suggesting that risk assessment was influenced by the eye used to monitor the threat. These findings are consistent with selection to make prey less predictable for their predators, despite underlying lateralization. 

Abstract Aging, often considered a result of random cellular damage, can be accurately estimated using DNA methylation profiles, the foundation of pan-tissue epigenetic clocks. Here, we demonstrate the development of universal pan-mammalian clocks, using 11,754 methylation arrays from our Mammalian Methylation Consortium, which encompass 59 tissue types across 185 mammalian species. These predictive models estimate mammalian tissue age with high accuracy (r > 0.96). Age deviations correlate with human mortality risk, mouse somatotropic axis mutations and caloric restriction. We identified specific cytosines with methylation levels that change with age across numerous species. These sites, highly enriched in polycomb repressive complex 2-binding locations, are near genes implicated in mammalian development, cancer, obesity and longevity. Our findings offer new evidence suggesting that aging is evolutionarily conserved and intertwined with developmental processes across all mammals.