HI all.
We are a small research company working in the field of odours from materials. We are now completing a project examining options for a technical long life lure. By technical we mean we have engineered the lure from base-odours and done some chemistry to increase longevity but there are no moving parts or electronics. The product is small and lasts around 100 days. We have trialed the lures on Aotea and now we would like to engage with community groups who are looking for long term lures and prepared to try something new. Ideally we need sites where monthly checks are being carried out now. The longer term goal is a product that can be used for longer between-check periods (once control has achieved low density or between pulses), but for the trial we need monthly checks.
The system is aimed at iterative reduction in operation time and cost as we learn more about how to best use the product. For example in our trials we have increased trap density along streams and sea front areas and reduced trap checks to once every three months on average with more checks late summer or as needed. We have no issues with trap overload.
They are hard blocks. Various options Some rodents only some rodents and mustelids.
It’s early in th development so we are looking for feedback. And we will incorporate that into the final product. They last around 100 days in our trials and outperform PnB for long term work.
Mustelids early days and harder to assess due to low catch rates on everything
We are looking for some groups to work with us as we develop further. They do work and they are easy to use. So feedback is to further improve the product:
The points of difference is they are scientifically developed, engineered products made to perform long term. And also engineered to be not attractive to insects.
Our group (Pirongia Enviro Group), have some small trap lines within Pirongia Village that get checked once a week - DOC200’s or T-rex & Victors. We would be up for trialing something. We have just started using luregards in our DOC 200’s to protect out peanut butter from being stolen - They are tied into the trap boxes - Seems to make a big difference - And anecdotally we may be catching more ship rats so are wondering if it is them that are stealing the caps of lure.
Hi
I have two trap lines in the Te Marua Golf Club, we have a number of DOC200 traps and are willing to try the bait in our traps. chris.brooksnz@outlook.com
Kia ora @syoung we would be interested in testing the scented lures. We are a newly established community group, who are just about to deploy over 100 new traps in an urban setting
HI and thanks for the contact.
If you drop us a line at admin@rattek.com you will be in the system.
We have a couple of Beta trials running for doc or snap traps and we can see which one will work for you.
Atē marie. I manage a mustelid trapping programme for the Pirongia Restoration Society (PRS). Your product could be useful in our work I think. We use trap boxes with either 2 x DOC 200 or single DOC 250s. on multiple lines which are serviced every four weeks.
Can you say a little more about these lures please? for example: can they be deployed on the traps we use and would our servicing regime fit with your objectives?
Hi Brian
The servicing interval is perfect but will be catering for any interval.
The situation now is we have a working product for rats - its a hard bait - presently wax based but that is not so important. The working odour is in slow release mechanism within the block. The odours are natural odours but mixed in a ratio which makes an attractant lasting about 100 days for rats. That product is due for release shortly. However for the New Zealand market we are now wanting to add a stoat attractant - we started that work 12 months ago and have had some success but we now need lots of data to trial a few options.
To complicate things we know different rodents species have different desires at different times - making a matrix of possibilities. Maybe the same for mustelids - at the least we will have temperature effects with our release mechanism. All that is covered within our research program - but quite a complex matrix to unravel. We work slowly from the known into the unknown - and this will take time.
The trials we will run for both mustelids and rats will probably be the same since the trapping overlaps, and will most probably be what we call odds and evens - so we will ask that you use one of your preferred lures as the control in every second trap and our supplied lure in the others.
We have four lures we wish to work through and while the seasons will change the catch rates we will still get a rough idea of what works best by accumulating up the data. We will not know exactly how we will do all this until we look at how many groups we have and how many traps of each type we get.
In a weeks time we will send each respondent a questionnaire regarding traps species, normal lure and check intervals, catch expectations and from that we will work with our trial designer to work out the best approach. Maybe some of what I outline above will change when we go through that first questionnaire.
We hope to visit groups at some point but may have issues getting around them all, but we find the chat over the traps better than sitting analysing data.
If that sounds interesting contact my team admin@rattek.com. You should hear back within a week.