PAPER: Using traits for effective pest control.

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

November 2020

Garvey PM, Banks PB, Suraci JP, Bodey TW, Glen AS, Jones CJ, McArthur C, Norbury GL, Price CJ, Russell JC and others 2020. Leveraging Motivations, Personality, and Sensory Cues for Vertebrate Pest Management. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 35(11): 990-1000.

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.

KEYWORDS

animal behaviour; individual variation; sensory cues; pest control; behaviour-based management; wildlife conservation