- 72 -there and many of those people do own pet cats and they don’t want to get rid of those cats. So a local regulation was put in place saying that people could keep their pet cats but the pets had to be neutered. Slide12: And although most of the local people were supportive of the new regulations, there was one resident who attempted to keep breeding cats in secret. So this is a good example of why it is absolutely essential in any eradication program that the local community is engaged and supportive. Because without the support of the local people there is a high risk that the eradication attempt will fail. On the other hand, the presence of a human population can also have advantages from an eradication point of view. The eradication team on Ascension Island found that there was great benet in working on an island which already had facilities and infrastructure such as roads, towns, shops where they could buy the supplies they needed and so on. This was part of the reason that the eradication on Ascension was able to be completed very quickly and eciently. There were also some lessons learnt from the Ascension Island experience, some things that the operators would do dierently if they had their time again. One of those was that they discovered after the eradication was complete, some of the local people were resentful of the fact that they had not been oered employment as part of the eradication project. The work was done by people from outside the island who were brought in specially. So it’s very important to include the local people as much as possible in an eradication effort including having local people involved in the planning and the carrying out and the subsequent monitoring of the eradication. And it’s also essential to promote the economic and social investments that the eradication project will bring to the island community, such as investment in new infrastructure, the creation of new jobs, and the opportunities for eco-tourism.Slide13: In any eradication operation there are some risks and challenges that must be considered before starting. And one example which may be relevant here on Amami is called mesopredator release. This is a situation where removing one predator can allow smaller predators to become more abundant or more widespread and actually cause more damage. As an example, here is a graph taken from a paper by my colleague Matt Rayner in New Zealand. This was an eradication of cats on Little Barrier Island in New Zealand and you can see on the graph there that after cats were removed from the island the breeding success of a critically endangered bird called Cook’s petrel actually decreased. The reason for that was that the removal of cats allowed rats to increase in number and it turned out that the rats were more eective predators of the birds than the cats had been. So the rats were then removed from the island as well and you can see in the far right-hand side of the graph that once rats were removed the breeding successes of Cook’s petrel increased dramatically. So it was a happy ending but it was almost a disaster because of mesopredator release. And the other major challenges with carrying out eradication operations generally involve the size
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