ACEBB Guest Speaker - Associate Professor Peter Banks

Hosted by the Australian Centre for Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity

ACEBB presented Associate PRofessor Peter Banks, from the University of Sydney on Monday 23rd April

New directions in ecologically based pest management: using behavioural ecology to reduce black rat impacts.

Alien rodents are arguably the world's worst vertebrate pests. They are major pests of the world's staple foods, and rats are major predators of birds, insects and other small mammals, and have been directly linked to extinctions in Australia and the Pacific. They also spread disease, out-compete local species and support elevated numbers of predators which go on to kill other native fauna. Despite these impacts, the underlying biology and ecology of the feral rodents are surprisingly poorly known. My research program has two foci - first I use manipulative experiments to reveal the nature of rodent impacts on native species, and the functional role of rodents in ecosystem processes and second I am developing a new understanding  about the exploitation of social signals by both predator and prey. In doing so we aim to generate new theory on the reactive foraging behaviour of predators and use this theory to solve conservation problems

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