Ostend Rat Trial

You may have seen recently that there have been adaptations to the operational rat pilot due to Omicron disruptions. In the adapted pilot design, there are three separate operational trials to answer the specific questions that island-wide eradication poses. This week, we will outline how each of the trials works and what will be learned from them.

The Ostend trial will run from May to September 2022 and include a variety of complex urban habitats such as the Resource Recovery Park, storage facilities, cafés, industrial businesses, wetland and mangroves. While there is much known in New Zealand about eradicating rats in rural, bush and forested areas, there is little known about eradicating rats from urban environments.

“The key learning will be whether we can expose all rats to bait, in an area that has a suite of different habitats within close proximity to each other,” says Biosecurity Restoration Specialist Grant Harper.

“Industrial areas can be quite dynamic, with material/goods often being moved around. In the case of Ostend there are also large areas of wetland and shrubland immediately behind the industrial area, so all in all there are a lot of potential habitat refuges for rats, which they can move between.”

Another important part of the trial is the mangrove habitat. While rats aren’t thought to live in mangrove areas, monitoring has revealed a high tracking rate of foragers entering the habitat.

“Very little rat control has been done in mangroves globally - maybe less than a half dozen sites. The only rat control carried out in mangroves were on uninhabited islands and baits were either attached directly to mangrove trees or thrown into trees as bait 'bolas' with two baits on each end of a piece of string.

“Rats have only been eradicated from one island with mangroves in the world, hence the need to trial bait stations for mangroves on Waiheke, where people are present.”

Te Korowai o Waiheke’s innovative minds have been developing prototypes for floating and lightweight stations as you can see in the video below (or more details on our website).

If you have further questions about this or any other trial, submit them here. They will be answered in the upcoming webinar with Rats Operations Manager, Markus Gronwald on Wednesday, March 16th at 5:30 pm. Alternatively, you can send enquiries directly to our community liaison rob@tekorowaiowaiheke.org.