Anticoagulant Rodenticides and Wildlife PDF
Preview Anticoagulant Rodenticides and Wildlife
Emerging Topics in Ecotoxicology Principles, Approaches and Perspectives Nico W. van den Brink John E. Elliott Richard F. Shore Barnett A. Rattner Editors Anticoagulant Rodenticides and Wildlife Emerging Topics in Ecotoxicology Principles, Approaches and Perspectives Volume 5 Series Editor Lee R. Shugart L.R. Shugart and Associates, Oak Ridge, TN, USA More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7360 Nico W. van den Brink • John E. Elliott Richard F. Shore • Barnett A. Rattner Editors Anticoagulant Rodenticides and Wildlife Editors Nico W. van den Brink John E. Elliott Division of Toxicology Environment and Climate Change Canada Wageningen University Science and Technology Branch Wageningen, The Netherlands Delta, BC, Canada Richard F. Shore Barnett A. Rattner Natural Environment Research Council U.S. Geological Survey Centre for Ecology and Hydrology Patuxent Wildlife Research Center Lancaster Environment Centre Beltsville, MD, USA Lancaster, UK ISSN 1868-1344 ISSN 1868-1352 (electronic) Emerging Topics in Ecotoxicology ISBN 978-3-319-64375-5 ISBN 978-3-319-64377-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64377-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954915 © Springer International Publishing AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword Throughout the developed world, rodents of one kind or another create problems for humanity. Not only do they feed on growing crops, they also consume stored food- stuffs, in the process often damaging the buildings and containers holding the food. In addition, they can act as disease carriers for people and livestock. Bubonic plague is perhaps the best known historical example. Yet only a small number of rodent species cause these various problems. Two of the most damaging are the rats Rattus norvegicus and R. rattus. Thanks to human activities, these two species are now found over most of the world, wherever there are people. They can also be serious predators of other wildlife, and have become one of the major causes of animal extinctions on oceanic islands to which they have been accidentally introduced. The need for some cost-effective means of controlling damaging rodents is therefore unequivocal. Throughout historical time, attempts have been made to reduce the numbers of problem rodents, using traps or predators. These pests were probably a major incen- tive that led to the domestication of cats. In the last two centuries, a variety of poi- sons have been used in attempts to reduce rodent numbers. In the 1950s, new kinds of poisons were developed, based on the naturally occurring plant-compound, cou- marin, a powerful anticoagulant capable of killing animals exposed to it. Several rodenticides were developed at this time, of which the most frequently used was warfarin. These chemicals disrupt the vitamin K cycle and thereby reduce the pro- duction of blood-clotting agents, ultimately causing death by internal bleeding. But within a few years after the introduction of these new rodenticides, rats and mice in various parts of Europe and North America became resistant to them. Resistance apparently arose independently in different areas but through the same biochemical mechanisms. This resistance soon spread widely to other areas. From the 1980s, these early rodenticides were therefore largely replaced by newer similarly based compounds, including difenacoum, bromadiolone, brodifa- coum and flocoumafen. These ‘second-generation’ or ‘single-feed’ anticoagulants act in the same way as warfarin, but they are more potent and more persistent. Again the problem of rodent control seemed resolved, but again resistance to some of these compounds soon developed, and is gradually spreading. Once again, we find v vi Foreword ourselves in a familiar ‘arms race’ between the pests developing resistance to ever more compounds and the pesticide manufacturers developing new and more effec- tive products. Moreover, the toxicity and persistence of second-generation rodenti- cides gave rise to another problem, namely, the secondary poisoning of rodent predators. As with warfarin, it may take several days for a poisoned rodent to die, during which time it can be caught and eaten by a predator which can thereby also receive a dose of the poison. If the rodent is resistant to the poison in question, it can remain as a mobile ‘poisoned bait’ for even longer. So like virtually all chemical pesticides, particular rodenticides can kill far more animals than just the target pests. This is because other animals are exposed and vulnerable to the chemicals involved, and in the case of rodenticides, secondary poisoning can occur as poisoned rodents are eaten by other animals which may in turn be killed. As the years have passed, more and more predatory birds and mam- mals have been found poisoned by rodenticides, and the proportions of individuals containing residues in their body tissues have grown. Not all individuals examined contained enough chemical to have killed them, but the assumption is that these persistent rodenticides can gradually accumulate in the body through time, as more poisoned rodents are consumed, until eventually the predator is itself killed. Some frequent victims are species of conservation concern, such as the barn owl and red kite in Europe. My own interest in anticoagulant rodenticides arose through my involvement in a scheme designed to monitor organochlorine chemicals in the livers of various predatory birds, organised from Monks Wood Research Station, near Huntingdon in southern England (Newton et al. 1993). Since the 1960s, we had requested car- casses of various predatory birds found dead by members of the public. Barn owl corpses were received fairly frequently. Many of these owls were road traffic vic- tims, while others had clearly died of starvation, especially in hard winters (Newton et al. 1997). Smaller numbers contained lethal levels of dieldrin, but none after 1976, in contrast to some other species, such as the sparrowhawk, which suffered population declines as a result of their exposure to organochlorines (Newton and Wyllie 1992). However, from 1984 on, we received increasing numbers of owls that showed internal bleeding, symptomatic of rodenticide poisoning, and different from anything we had seen in previous autopsies. So we put out a plea for more barn owl carcasses, and established a system for measuring the residues of various anticoagu- lant compounds in liver tissue. The first results from these surveys were published in 1990, to be followed by further analyses and experiments in later years (Newton et al. 1990). By the end of the century, about a third of all barn owls examined con- tained detectable residues of rodenticides, but only a small proportion at levels suf- ficient to have caused death. So far as I am aware, this work was the first to systematically check for anticoagulant poisoning in large samples of a wild preda- tor. The programme has been continued to the present (Shore et al. 2016), and in the meantime, many similar studies have been initiated in other countries (e.g. Lopez- Perea et al. 2015; Huang et al. 2016). Foreword vii Rodenticides have now become major subjects of research across Europe and North America. This book has been written by experts in various aspects of the problem, and aims to synthesise recent findings from around the world into a coherent whole. The idea for the book developed from two international meetings held in 2012, in Germany and California, respectively. This book gives an up- to-date account of our current knowledge on methods of rodent control, the bio- chemical mechanisms, resistance problems, and the impacts on target rodents and non-target species. Despite their problems, there can be no doubt that these chemi- cals have been of great benefit to humanity, and also to conservation, notably in eliminating rodents from certain offshore islands, allowing the local fauna to recover. At the same time however, the side effects have grown, or at least our knowledge of their extent has grown. While many non-target species are now exposed to rodenticides, it has proved difficult to assess their impacts on the popula- tion levels of these nont arget species. This is because mortality caused by rodenti- cides does not necessarily add to natural mortality, but may be compensated by reductions in natural mortality, so that the overall annual mortality of a population could remain little changed. The impact of a contaminant on a species population dynamics will of course be dependent on the degree of exposure and life history strategy, amongst other factors. Assessing the impacts of rodenticides on wild pred- ator populations is one of the issues highlighted in this book which requires further research. This book is a landmark in the study of rodenticides, which will be helpful to those researchers and practitioners who want an up-to-date account of modern rodent control, as well as to conservationists concerned with the impacts of rodenti- cides on non-target species. The authors and editors deserve our thanks for pulling together in one place such a useful amount of information on a growing problem. Ian Newton Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Crowmarsh Gifford, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK References Huang AC, Elliott JE, Hindmarch S, Lee SL, Maisonneuve F, Bowes V, Cheng KM, Martin K (2016) Increased rodenticide exposure rate and risk of toxicosis in barn owls (Tyto alba) from southwestern Canada and linkage with demographic but not genetic factors. Ecotoxicology 25(6):1061–1071. doi:10.1007/s10646-016-1662-6 Lopez-Perea JJ, Camarero PR, Molina-Lopez RA, Parpal L, Obon E, Sola J, Mateo R (2015) Interspecific and geographical differences in anticoagulant rodenticide residues of predatory wildlife from the Mediterranean region of Spain. Sci Total Environ 511:259–267. doi:10.1016/j. scitotenv.2014.12.042 Newton I, Wyllie I (1992) Recovery of a Sparrowhawk population in relation to declining pesticide contamination. J Appl Ecol 29:476–484 Newton I, Wyllie I, Freestone P (1990) Rodenticides in British Barn Owls. Environ Pollut 68:101–117 viii Foreword Newton I, Wyllie I, Asher A (1993) Long-term trends in organochlorine and mercury residues in some predatory birds in Britain. Environ Pollut 79 (2):143–151 Newton I, Wyllie I, Dale L (1997) Mortality causes in British Barn Owls (Tyto alba) based on 1,101 carcasses examined during 1963-1996. In: Duncan JR, Johnson DH, Nicholls TH (eds) Biology and Conservation of Owls of the Northern Hemisphere. United States Department of Agriculture, Second International Symposium, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, 5–9 Feb 1997, pp 299–307 Shore RF, Walker LA, Potter ED, Pereira G (2016) Second generation anticoagulant rodenticide residues in barn owls 2015. CEH contract report to the Campaign for Responsible Rodenticide Use (CRRU) UK, 17 pp. http://pbms.ceh.ac.uk/sites/pbms.ceh.ac.uk/files/stewardship- 2015-owls.pdf Contents 1 Anticoagulant Rodenticides and Wildlife: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Nico W. van den Brink, John E. Elliott, Richard F. Shore, and Barnett A. Rattner 2 Use of Anticoagulant Rodenticides in Different Applications Around the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Jens Jacob and Alan Buckle 3 Anticoagulant Rodenticide Toxicity to Non- target Wildlife Under Controlled Exposure Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Barnett A. Rattner and F. Nicholas Mastrota 4 Pharmacokinetics of Anticoagulant Rodenticides in Target and Non-target Organisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Katherine E. Horak, Penny M. Fisher, and Brian Hopkins 5 Ante-mortem and Post-mortem Signs of Anticoagulant Rodenticide Toxicosis in Birds of Prey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Maureen Murray 6 Primary Exposure and Effects in Non-target Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Richard F. Shore and Michaël Coeurdassier 7 Secondary Exposure to Anticoagulant Rodenticides and Effects on Predators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Jhon J. López-Perea and Rafael Mateo 8 Spatial Dimensions of the Risks of Rodenticide Use to Non-target Small Mammals and Applications in Spatially Explicit Risk Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Michaël Coeurdassier, Clémentine Fritsch, Marion Jacquot, Nico W. van den Brink, and Patrick Giraudoux ix x Contents 9 Ecological Factors Driving Uptake of Anticoagulant Rodenticides in Predators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Sofi Hindmarch and John E. Elliott 10 Development of Resistance to Anticoagulant Rodenticides in Rodents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Philippe Berny, Alexandra Esther, Jens Jacob, and Colin Prescott 11 An International Perspective on the Regulation of Rodenticides . . . . 287 John D. Eisemann, Penny M. Fisher, Alan Buckle, and Simon Humphrys 12 Anticoagulants and Risk Mitigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 Alan Buckle and Colin Prescott 13 Perspectives on Existing and Potential New Alternatives to Anticoagulant Rodenticides and the Implications for Integrated Pest Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 Gary W. Witmer 14 Anticoagulant Rodenticides and Wildlife: Concluding Remarks . . . 379 Nico W. van den Brink, John E. Elliott, Richard F. Shore, and Barnett A. Rattner Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
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