culling-induced changes in badger (meles meles) behaviour, social organisation and the epidemiology of bovine tuberculosisculling-induced獾(梅莱斯梅莱斯)行为的变化,社会组织和牛结核病的流行病学.pdfVIP

Culling-Induced Changes in Badger (Meles meles) Behaviour, Social Organisation and the Epidemiology of Bovine Tuberculosis 1 2 2 1 Philip Riordan *, Richard John Delahay , Chris Cheeseman , Paul James Johnson , David Whyte Macdonald1 1 Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2 The Food and Environment Research Agency, York, United Kingdom Abstract In the UK, attempts since the 1970s to control the incidence of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in cattle by culling a wildlife host, the European badger (Meles meles), have produced equivocal results. Culling-induced social perturbation of badger populations may lead to unexpected outcomes. We test predictions from the ‘perturbation hypothesis’, determining the impact of culling operations on badger populations, movement of surviving individuals and the influence on the epidemiology of bTB in badgers using data dervied from two study areas within the UK Government’s Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT). Culling operations did not remove all individuals from setts, with between 34–43% of badgers removed from targeted social groups. After culling, bTB prevalence increased in badger social groups neighbouring removals, particularly amongst cubs. Seventy individual adult badgers were fitted with radio-collars, yielding 8,311 locational fixes from both sites between November 2001 and December 2003. Home range areas of animals surviving within removed groups increased by 43.5% in response to culling. Overlap between summer ranges of individuals from Neighbouring social groups in the treatment population increased by 73.3% in response to culling. The movement