Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
One initiative to elicit greater responsibility among the pet-owing public has
recently been taken in the United States. There the pet industry launched in 2005 a
focused public-education campaign called Habitattitude to prevent release of
unwanted pets. Educational activities are largely directed to getting the pet-owning
public to avoid impulse buying of pets, to make informed decisions about which
pets to choose, and to place unwanted pets in other responsible captive situations in
lieu of releasing them to the wild (Reaser and Meyers, 2008). Information on how
to meet these goals is provided to prospective buyers in participating pet stores and
is available on the web sites of industry advisory councils. This program is one
sensible response to the flood of releases due to the pet trade, but it is also young,
and it remains to be seen how effective it will prove in decreasing releases to the
wild. The tremendous success of the anti-littering campaign in the United States in
the late 1960s suggests that a widespread public-education campaign can quickly
change human behaviors if that campaign is approached with sufficient vigor. This
is exactly what is needed in most developed countries to prevent pet release. The
Habitattitude campaign remains the only attempt to devise a non-regulatory
approach to the pet-trade pathway of which I am aware. It may prove deserving of
emulation elsewhere, and similar programs may be relevant to the related problem
of religious “mercy” releases of alien herpetofauna in Buddhist countries. In any
event, greater responsibility by private citizens is crucial to preventing additional
introductions and invasions of alien reptiles and amphibians and will likely need to
operate in concert with greater regulatory oversight or adoption of means to
increase the economic valuation of pets.
Implications for Research
Innumerable gaps remain in our knowledge of herpetological naturalizations and
invasions, the factors that determine their dynamics, the magnitude and frequency
of their deleterious impacts, and how they might best be prevented and mitigated.
Scientific information on invasive reptiles and amphibians lags far behind that
available for better-studied taxa like mammals, plants, and marine invertebrates.
Many of these knowledge gaps are of critical management importance - not to
mention of intrinsic scientific interest - and I have already indicated how they can
sometimes serve to justify management inaction.
Before considering how research might best be focused to address these topics,
it is worthwhile to consider for a moment the reasons for this mediocre state of
knowledge. In large part, these reasons are historical and lie in the intersection of
scientific culture with economic motivation. Invasion biology as a subdiscipline of
conservation biology is to a significant extent an applied science. And applied biology
has historically been discouraged or disparaged in the academic environment, being
assigned a low value because it is often not theoretically challenging and does not
expand the conceptual boundaries of fundamental scientific understanding. That
perception reflects the value system within academia, and that is fair enough. To put
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