A mechanistic understanding of prebaiting to improve interaction with wildlife management devices.

Background: Prebaiting is a technique involving early deployment of 'unarmed' devices (e.g. baits and traps) to increase efficacy of wildlife management. Although commonly used, the mechanisms by which prebaiting works are poorly understood. We propose three mechanisms by which prebaiting may increase device interaction probabilities; (1) overcoming neophobia towards novel devices, (2) a 'trickle in' effect increasing time for animals to encounter devices; and (3) social information transfer about rewards associated with devices. We conducted a survey of 100 articles to understand how prebaiting has been used. We then tested our proposed prebaiting mechanisms using a global pest (black rats, Rattus rattus) examining how uniquely marked free-living rats responded to a common yet novel monitoring technique (tracking tunnels).

Results: No studies in our dataset tested how prebaiting functioned. Most studies (61%) did not propose a mechanism for prebaiting, but overcoming neophobia was most commonly mentioned. We only found partial support for the overcoming neophobia hypothesis in our field test. We found the dominant mechanism operating in our system to be the 'trickle in' effect with the proportion of individuals visiting the device increasing over time. We found no support for social information transfer as a mechanism of prebaiting.

Conclusion: Applying a mechanistic understanding of how prebaiting functions will improve the efficacy of management devices. Our results suggest that prebaiting allows time for more rats to encounter a device, hence surveys in our system would benefit from long prebaiting periods. © 2021 Society of Chemical Industry.