Better food-based baits and lures for rats and possums

What is it about?

Food-based baits and lures remain the mainstay of eradication and monitoring methodologies for invasive mammalian species. To date, peanut butter has proven to be a convenient and attractive bait for a wide range of animals, including rats. Cinammon is frequently used in baits targetting possums. We designed a rapid bioassay using chew-cards to present large numbers of food-based products to free-ranging rats and possums to assess their attractiveness and consumption compared to current standards. Cheese, milk chocolate, Nutella® and walnut were statistically more attractive than the peanut butter standard for rats. Apricot and almond were statistically more attractive that the cinnamon standard for possums. Further analyses indicated that energy, particularly from fats, is the most important determinant of consumption by rats, while protein is the most important determinant of consumption by possums.

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Why is it important?

Our results demonstrate that current standard lures for both species could be more attractive whilst the inclusion of fat to rat baits and protein to possum baits could increase bait consumption and improve control operation outcomes. Further, our bioassay provides practitioners a cost effective and rapid methodology to systematically assess large numbers of food products on free-ranging, wild animals thus providing more realistic results than those obtained under pen or laboratory conditions.