Behavior-Based Rodent Management: Mechanisms, Challenges, and Opportunities

Managing the impact of rodent pests is a multi-million-dollar global industry, but it has an Achilles' heel; its effectiveness relies upon rodents deciding to interact with management devices. Too often, rodent management falls short of expectations because animals do not make the decisions we want. In this paper, we introduce the concept of "behavior-based rodent management" (BBRM) to promote a strategic focus on behavior in rodent management and help address this issue. BBRM is an extension of ecologically based rodent management (EBRM), which has been highly successful in improving rodent management outcomes by working with the ecological processes that drive rodent impacts. We suggest BBRM offers scope for significant further refinements in overcoming the challenges that rodent behavior poses to effective control of rodents and their impacts. Here, we first explain how rodents make decisions to interact with devices, shaped by risk-reward trade-offs and their motivational states. We then discuss three main factors that influence these decisions: the environmental context of the decision, temporal variation in decisions, and individual variation in responses. We explore how these factors not only challenge current practice but offer opportunities for novel approaches. We end by identifying priority areas for future research to address key unknowns about the nature of information and how rodents use it.