- 71 -marsupials were returned to the wild after feral cats had been eradicated from the island. And nally, there's also been cases where birds which had not nested on a particular island for, in some cases, many, many decades have returned and began to nest on these islands again within only two or three years after feral cats had been removed.Slide9: Next I would like to talk briefly about some of the social and economic benefits that can arise from eradicating feral cats. The rst and most obvious one of these is the benets of eco-tourism. Obviously, in the case of Amami O-shima if-when listing in a World Natural Heritage register is achieved this is going to have great benets for tourism to the island. Another advantage that often arises is that eradication programs provide employment opportunities for local people. And we can see in the photograph here this is an eradication taking place in Mexico, where local people were employed as hunters to remove goats from this island. That provided a very valuable source of employment for local people and once again here on Amami we have similar example, as we just saw the Amami mongoose busters that provides employment currently for around 40 people. And nally cats can carry and spread diseases which can be harmful to other wildlife as well as to farm animals and in some cases to humans. The best example of that is toxoplasmosis, which is harmful to both wild animals, livestock and people. But this is a disease which cannot exist without the presence of feral cats. So cat eradication will completely rid the ecosystem of this disease.Slide10: Next I’m going to talk about the eradication of cats on larger islands and islands which are inhabited by people. So there are four places around the world where cats have been eradicated from relatively large islands which have a human population. These are shown on the map here: Ascension and Tristan da Cunha Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, Marion Island, which I’ve already mentioned in the Indian Ocean and nally, Macquarie Island, which is a territory of Australia and which is in Southern Ocean. All of these islands are over 100 kilometer square and all have a population of around 1,000 people or less. In three of the four of these cases, the cat eradication has involved a combination of different methods which has included trapping, hunting and the use of poisons. Unfortunately in the fourth case, which was Tristan da Cunha, the eradication happened many years ago in the mid-1970s and no information was recorded at the time regarding the methods used. So we don’t actually know how that eradication was achieved. Slide11: I’d like to talk a little bit more in detail about the eradication on Ascension Island, because of the islands where cat eradication has taken place so far, this is the one which I think is most similar to Amami because it is one of the few large islands, and it is also the island which has the highest number of people. There are around 1,000 people living on Ascension Island. And so one way in which Ascension Island is very similar to Amami is that there are people living
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