Browsing by Author "Singleton, Grant R."

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Mice, rats, and people: the bio-economics of agricultural rodent pests
(Wiley, 2003) Stenseth, Nils Chr; Leirs, Herwig; Skonhoft, Anders; Davis, Stephen A; Pech, Roger P; Andreassent, Harry P; Singleton, Grant R.; Lima, Mauricio; Machang'u, Robert S; Makundi, Rhodes H; Zhang, Zhibin; Brown, Peter R; Shi, Dazhao; Wan, Xinrong
Mice, rats, and other rodents threaten food production and act as reservoirs for disease throughout the world. In Asia aldne, the rice loss every year caused by rodents could feed about 200 million people. Damage to crops in Africa and South America is equally dramatic. Rodent control often comes too late, is inefficient, or is considered too expensive. Using the multimammate mouse (Mastomys natalensis) in Tanzania and the house mouse (Mus domesticus) in southeastern Australia as primary case studies, we demonstrate how ecology and economics can be combined to identify management strategies to make rodent control work more efficiently than it does today. Three more rodent-pest systems - including two from Asia, the rice-field rat (Rattus argentiventer) and Brandt's vole (Microtus brandti), and one from I South America, the leaf-eared mouse (Phyllotis darwini) - are presented within the same bio-economic per- spective. For all these species, the ability to relate outbreaks to interannual climatic variability creates the potential to assess the economic benefits of forecasting rodent outbreaks.
Rats, mice and people: rodent biology and management
(Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, 2003) Singleton, Grant R.; Hinds, Lyn A.; Krebs, Charles J.; Spratt, Dave M.
Infectious diseases in rodent populations are discussed from the twin viewpoints of their threat to human health and their role in rodent population dynamics. This is not, though, a definitive or exhaustive review, but an attempt to identify important and/or interesting themes. As regards human health, most recent attention has been directed at emerging infections, but some rodent-reservoir zoonoses are ‘sleeping giants’ that may awake at any time. Many human infections are never assigned an aetiological agent, and the ‘sources’ of many human pathogens remain unknown. Rodent-reservoir zoonoses may be important in both cases. In some cases, the economic damage caused by a pathogen may demand action even though medical effects, by most measures of public health, are trivial. Finally, the ‘hottest’ topic in human infectious diseases is bioterrorism. Rodent-reservoir zoonoses account for many of the apparently prime candidates. As regards rodent populations, four topics are addressed, focusing on work from our group at Liverpool—the effects of endemic pathogens on host fecundity as evidenced by experimental studies; their effects on host survival as evidenced by the analysis of field data; analyses of the transmission dynamics of infection and the light these throw on common theoretical assumptions; and the possible role of pathogens in microtine rodent cycles. Finally, at the interface between rodent populations and human health, the importance of distinguishing between reservoir, liaison and incidental hosts is emphasised; the contrasts between controlling zoonotic infections and other human infections are discussed; and a connection between contrasting types of rodent zoonosis and the nature of pathogen virulence is suggested.