A meeting of mice and men: rodent impacts on food security, human diseases and wildlife conservation; ecosystem benefits; fascinating biological models

Abstract

Rodents attract attention often for their negative impacts on the well-being of people as competitors for our staple foods such as cereals (Singleton et al. 2010) or as carriers of human diseases (Meerburg et al. 2009). They also are pilloried for their impacts on the conservation of wildlife, especially birds and reptiles that nest or dwell on the ground on oceanic islands (Russell and Holmes 2015) or larger land masses (Ruscoe and Pech 2010). However, rodents should be viewed in a much broader context. They make up some 42% of mammalian species and less than 10% of species pose significant impacts on humans in agricultural or urban settings (Singleton et al. 2007), and, indeed, many play important roles in ecosystems (Dickman 1999;Werner et al. 2015). It is a common interest in the breadth of research questions on rodents that leads to a gathering of international biologists every 4 years. The 5th International Conference of Rodent Biology and Management (ICRBM) held in Zhengzhou, China, in August 2014, was attended by 166 participants from 25 countries. Some 190 presentations and posters were presented on both basic and applied research of rodents in the fields of ecology, behaviour, reproductive physiology, taxonomy and evolution, parasitology (micro-and macro), rodent-plant interactions, community ecology, ecosystem services, genes and neuro-science, chemical communication, and their negative impacts on conservation, food security, and health. There were also symposia on squirrels, subterranean rodents and urban rodents. The 1st ICRBM was held in Beijing in 1998 and the conference has developed considerably in its breadth of topics in the intervening 16 years (see http://www.icrbm.org/previousicrbms). A selection of papers were published from the 1st ICRBM (Singleton et al. 1999), all were peer reviewed and published from the 2nd ICRBM (Singleton et al. 2003), and a selection of papers were published from the 3rd ICRBM ) and the 4th ICRBM (Hinds and Singleton 2011). The current issue provides a selection of papers associated with the 5th ICRBM and has an interesting spread, with four being focused on Africa, two on Europe, four on Asia, one on Australia, and one on Canada. To highlight the cosmopolitan mix of contributions, two of the African papers have lead authors from Belgium and New Zealand, and three from Asia have lead authors from France and the United Kingdom.The conference in Zhengzhou had eight plenary presentations, all of outstanding merit. An interesting development was that the respective plenary presentations by Joel Brown, Jana Eccard and Peter Banks had a strong focus on behavioural ecology, particularly on how rodents manage their 'night to night' activities, given the risks associated with predators, and intraspecific competition for resources. The risks associated with this 'landscape of fear' can have major effects on the spacing behaviour of animals and on their genetic fitness. This is an area of research that has progressed remarkably (see Bedoya-Perez et al. 2013 for review) since ...

Interplay between historical and current features of the cityscape in shaping the genetic structure of the house mouse (Mus musculus domesticus) in Dakar (Senegal, West Africa)

“…Invasive rats and mice are archetypal commensals and a major concern for public health, food security and biodiversity all around the world (Angel et al, 2009;Meerburg et al, 2009;Parsons et al, 2017;Singleton, L Hinds, et al, 2003;Singleton, Jacob, et al, 2015). Rodent control actions are costly, and classical control protocols, relying mostly on poisoning, have proven to be quite inefficient in reducing urban rodent densities in the long term (Parsons et al, 2017;Richardson, Burak, et al, 2017).…”

Interplay between historical and current features of the cityscape in shaping the genetic structure of the house mouse (Mus musculus domesticus) in Dakar (Senegal, West Africa)

“…Invasive rats and mice are archetypal commensals and a major concern for public health, food security and biodiversity all around the world (Angel et al, 2009;Meerburg et al, 2009;Parsons et al, 2017;Singleton et al, 2003Singleton et al, , 2015. Rodent control actions are costly, and classical control protocols, relying mostly on poisoning, have proven to be quite inefficient in reducing urban rodent densities in the long term (Parsons et al, 2017;Richardson et al, 2017).…”

Incorporating space in hierarchical capture mark recapture models: can we better capture variance?

“…Despite the important role that rodents play in ecosystem functioning (Dickman 1999), and the impact they can have on both food production (e.g. agricultural pest species;(Singleton et al 2015; 2010) and public health (Meerburg, Singleton, and Kijlstra 2009, e.g. as hosts of a range of different zoonotic diseases; plague: Mccauley et al 2015; Russell et al 2021, Lassa virus : Frame et al 1970, and hantaviruses : Guo et al 2013), there are few examples where spatially explicit capture mark recapture models have been used to investigate their population parameters such as survival (but see e.g.…”