Leveraging Motivations, Personality, and Sensory Cues for Vertebrate Pest Management

Abstract

Managing vertebrate pests is a global conservation challenge given their undesirable socio-ecological impacts. Pest management often focuses on the 'average' individual, neglecting individual-level behavioural variation ('personalities') and differences in life histories. These differences affect pest impacts and modify attraction to, or avoidance of, sensory cues. Strategies targeting the average individual may fail to mitigate damage by 'rogues' (individuals causing disproportionate impact) or to target 'recalcitrants' (individuals avoiding standard control measures). Effective management leverages animal behaviours that relate primarily to four core motivations: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and fornication. Management success could be greatly increased by identifying and exploiting individual variation in motivations. We provide explicit suggestions for cue-based tools to manipulate these four motivators, thereby improving pest management outcomes.Looking Beyond the 'Average' Individual in Vertebrate Pest Management Vertebrate pests, including invasive or overabundant predators and herbivores, frequently come into conflict with economic, social, and biodiversity values. Mammalian predators are responsible for some of the most devastating losses to native biodiversity [1] and frequently harm humans, their livestock, and pets, while herbivores can cause agricultural damage, vehicle collisions, and ecosystem-level impacts including overbrowsing [2,3]. Mitigating the impacts of vertebrate pests thus presents one of the major challenges currently facing wildlife managers. Managers require effective strategies to: (i) reduce pest populations (e.g., by attracting individuals to traps or toxic baits), and (ii) deter individuals from sensitive areas or valuable species (e.g., threatened prey or plant species, livestock, agricultural, and forestry sites). Yet, pest control measures are often only partially effective [4,5], with some individuals avoiding lethal control or ignoring deterrents. Attractants and deterrents typically target the 'average' individual in a population, with the goal of maximising the number of animals responding to stimuli. However, the most intractable challenges of vertebrate pest management may occur precisely because some individuals do not behave like the average, and therefore, are not effectively targeted.Within a pest population, individuals exhibit a range of responses to management actions. Deviations from the average response may be transient (e.g., dependent on internal state, body condition, current perceived risk, or density of conspecifics) [6], or may represent persistent, individual-level behavioural differences ('personalities') [7,8]. By understanding the drivers of individual-level differences in behaviour, management can be optimized to target not just the average individual, but the full range of behavioural types within a population. Such insights may be particularly valuable in managing rogue and recalcitrant individuals (see Glossary), two non-exclusive behavioural types t...

A mechanistic understanding of prebaiting to improve interaction with wildlife management devices

“…Indeed, a targeted focus on and greater consideration of the traits of individuals that vary in trap wariness is recommended to improve wildlife and pest management outcomes. 52 We found no evidence in support of the social transfer of information hypothesis. There was no spike in visitation by new individuals on night two, nor were these subsequent new individuals more likely to enter a device that had previously been entered by a conspecific (as would have been expected if conspecifics of night one visitors had learned about the location and/or safety of the device via social transfer of information).…”

“…Each of our proposed prebaiting mechanisms relies upon animals returning to the device when it is armed. Animals need to be motivated to return to a device and this is often achieved by offering a food reward 52 likely to be taken by the first visitor leaving subsequent visitors unrewarded. However, if the potential benefits of gaining food upon return outweigh the investigation costs, 50 then individuals are likely to revisit baited devices.…”

“…Motivating animals to effectively interact with our management devices is challenging but essential to maximize the cost efficiency of management programmes. 52 Prebaiting has long been used to improve the efficacy of wildlife management techniques, particularly for small mammals, without understanding how it works. In our test case with black rats we found that, contrary to laboratory studies, most free-living black rats in the natural environment were not neophobic towards new devices in their environment (although some individuals within the population did increase their level of interaction with the device after repeated visits).…”

Top-down and sideways: Herbivory and cross-ecosystem connectivity shape restoration success at the salt marsh-upland ecotone

“…However, the concept of harnessing fear of predators to enhance restoration success remains intriguing and is worth further examination. Indeed, fear of predators as a management tool has garnered increasing attention in terrestrial conservation applications [ 63 , 64 ], and we suggest that such approaches may be similarly fruitful in transition habitats such as salt marshes. Insights from terrestrial applications suggest that the combination of multiple predator cues (e.g., auditory, olfactory, and visual) may increase the effectiveness of predator manipulations, providing a valuable starting point for further applications to marsh restoration.…”

Catch me if you can: personality drives technique-specific biases during live-capture trapping

“…Animal movement (Read and Moseby 2001), demographics (Kay et al 2000;Rodda et al 2007), state-dependent factors (Laves and Loeb 2006;Bisi et al 2011) and individual personality (Biro and Dingemanse 2009) can influence encounter and capture rates. Live-capture techniques rely on animal decision-making for success (Garvey et al 2021); however, if techniques are perceived to present danger or risk, capture success may vary. For example, entering a trap can be associated with a degree of risk by animals (Stokes 2013;K.…”