National Wildlife Management Centre, Animal and Plant Health Agency, York, United Kingdom.
Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), Rome, Italy.
PLoS One. 2020 Sep 18;15(9):e0238429. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238429. eCollection 2020.
Wild boar and feral swine number and range are increasing worldwide in parallel with their impact on biodiversity and human activities. The ecological and economic impact of this species include spread of diseases, vehicle collisions, damage to crops, amenities and infrastructures and reduction in plant and animal abundance and richness. As traditional methods such as culling have not contained the growth and spread of wild boar and feral pigs, alternative methods such as fertility control are now advocated. We used empirical data on two isolated wild boar populations to model and compare the effects of different regimes of culling and fertility control on population trends. We built a Bayesian population model and applied it to explore the implications for population control of various management options combining culling and/or contraception. The results showed that, whilst fertility control on its own was not sufficient to achieve the target reduction in wild boar number, adding fertility control to culling was more effective than culling alone. In particular, using contraceptives on 40% of the population to complement the culling of 60% of the animals, halved the time to achieve our target reduction compared with culling only. We conclude that, assuming the effort of adding fertility control to culling was found to be cost-effective in terms of population reduction, these two methods should be used simultaneously if a rapid decrease in wild boar number is required for a closed population.
野猪和野猪数量和范围在全球范围内与它们对生物多样性和人类活动的影响成正比。这种物种的生态和经济影响包括疾病传播、车辆碰撞、破坏农作物、设施和基础设施以及减少植物和动物的丰富度和丰富度。由于传统的方法，如扑杀，并没有遏制野猪和野猪的增长和传播，现在提倡使用替代方法，如控制生育。我们使用了两个孤立的野猪种群的经验数据来模拟和比较不同的扑杀和控制生育的方法对种群趋势的影响。我们建立了一个贝叶斯种群模型，并应用它来探索各种管理选项（结合扑杀和/或避孕）对种群控制的影响。结果表明，尽管单独的控制生育不足以实现野猪数量的目标减少，但将控制生育与扑杀相结合比单独扑杀更有效。特别是，在 40%的人口中使用避孕药具来补充 60%的动物扑杀，与仅扑杀相比，达到目标减少所需的时间减半。我们的结论是，假设在减少种群方面，将控制生育与扑杀相结合的努力被证明是具有成本效益的，如果需要一个封闭种群中野猪数量的快速减少，那么这两种方法应该同时使用。
