Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
interested partners may be coordinated. For these reasons, much of the discussion
in this chapter necessarily focuses on governmental management responses and
how to improve those. Nonetheless, it should be understood that nothing logically
requires that response actions be monopolized by government entities (with the
obvious exception of border protection per se), and responsible actions taken by
private organizations and individuals can help considerably in reducing alien
herpetofaunal invasions.
Critical for future herpetofaunal control operations must be the adoption of a
new professional mentality. In particular, pro-active research, comprehensive
planning, sufficient funds, and dedicated personnel trained in wildlife control are
indispensable - a point repeatedly made in the literature and explicitly adopted in
the many successful mammal eradications that have occurred over the past 20+
years (Veitch and Clout, 2002; Nogales et al., 2004; K. Campbell and Donlan,
2005; Howald et al., 2007). The current state of the art with herpetofaunal eradi-
cation attempts is far from this standard. Indeed, one is frequently struck by the
ad hoc nature of many such eradication operations. This is not a reflection on the
personnel engaged in these operations, who are often researchers having little
outside support, no tested or refined tools at their disposal, and no wildlife-con-
trol experience. These researchers have merely responded out of desperation to
try to correct conservation problems facing native animals that have been ignored
by responsible agencies. The successful eradication of
Limnodynastes dumerili
from New Zealand (Whitaker and Bejakovich, 2000),
Rana catesbeiana
from
Great Britain (Fisher and Garner, 2007), and at least two of three
Xenopus laevis
populations from the United States (Tinsley and McCoid, 1996) may be excep-
tions to the general pattern of eradication failure in large part because eradication
was placed in the hands of conservation-management professionals. Expecting
researchers to fix these ecological messes is to rely on the gratis services of
people with the wrong sets of skills. To date, resources have rarely been devoted
to finding and professionally applying viable eradication or control methods to
address herpetofaunal invasions.
Of course, merely developing predictive tools for risk assessment or for control/
eradication does not guarantee that they will be vigorously (or even sensibly)
implemented by governments or other parties. As an obvious illustration of this,
useful predictive tools for screening deliberate plant introductions have been avail-
able for over a decade but have been implemented only in Australia and New
Zealand (although interest in their application has recently grown in some other
jurisdictions, c.f., Gordon et al., 2008). Following the pattern for alien invasions
generally, there has been a particular reluctance to act against herpetological incur-
sions on the part of most governments. As noted in the last chapter, some of this
derives from disbelief that alien reptiles and amphibians constitute real ecological
or economic problems that warrant social response. But this reluctance is more
general than just disbelief, sometimes occurring even when the undesirability of the
alien species is acknowledged.
This points to the little-discussed management issues of political will and political
organization, the presence and structure of which determine the effectiveness of all
