Forecasting the impact of food‐provisioning and other stressors on a marine top‐predator population

Wildlife tourism can alter animal behavior, affect vital rates and diminish population viability but its impact in the context of other human‐ and environmental disturbances, remain largely unstudied. Using simulation models and leveraging a robust long‐term dataset spanning eight years, we evaluated the contribution of wildlife feeding, in the context of other anthropogenic and environmental stressors, on the trajectory of a population of Indo‐Pacific bottlenose dolphin Tursiops aduncus off Bunbury, Western Australia. Our study forecasts this dolphin population to decline from 350 to 7.41 (SD = 4.61) individuals in 100 years and shows that food‐provisioning, which has been shown to lower calf survival, exacerbates this result, increasing the forecasted decline from 85.5 to 98%. Co‐occurring stressors, including a potential morbillivirus outbreak and other anthropogenic disturbances were shown to further accelerate the forecast population decline. In contrast, simulated management actions targeted to increase calf survival were successful in reversing the projected decline. In light of our results, we recommend that management actions should prioritize reducing impacts of those anthropogenic activities (i.e. food‐provisioning) that exert a documented fitness cost on wildlife and are more readily tractable.