This year’s Jill Landsberg Trust Fund Scholarship recipient will use the funding to undertake field trials of a new method of cat control, which has the potential to significantly improve the success of threatened species reintroductions and protect remaining populations of native wildlife.

The “Population Protecting Implant” (PPI) is microchip-sized capsule implanted under the skin of native small mammals, where it remains inactive unless the animal is eaten by a predator, like a feral cat.

Like many modern medicines the capsule, which is filled with 1080 poison, has a polymer coating that does not degrade unless it comes into contact with stomach acid—making it harmless to the carrier, but deadly to the predator.

While the capsule has been tested in the lab, field trials—to be conducted by Ned Levi Ryan-Schofield, a Masters Student at the University of Adelaide—are required to show the capsules are safe and effective to have them registered with the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) for broader use in conservation programs.

“Field testing provides evidence required to register new products like this implant, and the earlier we can produce this evidence, the earlier it can be rolled out in conservation programs across Australia and potentially be used to reduce the impacts of feral cats on many of our threatened native species,” says Ned.

Ned will test the efficacy of the implant as a poison delivery system in controlled pen trials, the safety for implanted native carriers and stability of the implant in wild populations.

If the implant is deemed both effective and safe, Ned will test the whole system by implanting the capsules into native small mammals, either currently living with cats or being reintroduced into an area where cats have not been eliminated, to see if it helps them survive. Testing this product in an applied setting is vital.

While the implant will not protect the individual carrier from cats, it is hoped that this method will target so-called “catastrophic cats”, which have learned to hunt that prey species and can threaten the viability of small and reintroduced populations, even when only one or two cats are present.

The team also believes from an animal welfare perspective the capsule represents an improvement on current 1080 baiting programs.

Ned says, “by encapsulating 1080 at a very high dose in the PPI’s, we dramatically reduce the likelihood of non-target species uptake that may occur during aerial meat baiting. We also eliminate the possibility of delivering a low or sub-lethal dose reducing the suffering of introduced predators, while only targeting those individual cats that prey on the reintroduced species, thereby limiting the number of feral cats that must be poisoned to protect our native animals.”

Ned Ryan-Schofield from The University of Adelaide is the winner of the 2020 Jill Landsberg Trust Fund Scholarship for the project “Population Protecting Implants: Reducing the impacts of feral predators on native wildlife by rendering their prey toxic.”

He will receive his award at the ESA’s 2020 Conference and present his results at ESA 2021.

The $6,000 prize is awarded annually by the Ecological Society of Australia in honour of Australian ecologist Jill Landsberg. More at: www.ecolsoc.org.au/awards-and-prizes/student-awards-grants/jill-landsberg-trust-fund-scholarship

Two other projects were highly commended for the award:

• Allison Broad from the University of Wollongong for the project: Anchor scour as a disturbance agent to seafloor biota: a large-scale experimental examination of impacts.
• Dympna Cullen from the University of New South Wales for the project: Refuges of the crest-tailed mulgara; understanding the ecological requirements of a threatened native meso-predator.