Foreword to the Special Issue on ‘Fertility control for wildlife in the 21st century’

Cheryl S. Asa; Stephanie L. Boyles Griffin; Douglas Eckery; Lyn A. Hinds; Giovanna Massei

doi:10.1071/WR23142

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

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Foreword to the Special Issue on ‘Fertility control for wildlife in the 21st century’

Cheryl S. Asa ^A , Stephanie L. Boyles Griffin ^B , Douglas Eckery ^C , Lyn A. Hinds

^D and Giovanna Massei

^E ^*

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) Reproductive Management Center at the Saint Louis Zoo, St Louis, MO 63110, USA.

^B Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control (BIWFC), Media, PA 19063, USA.

^C USDA APHIS WS National Wildlife Research Center, Fort Collins, CO 80521, USA.

^D Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Canberra, ACT, Australia.

^E Department of Environment and Geography, Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control, University of York, Wentworth Way, Heslington, York YO10 5NG, UK.

^* Correspondence to: giovanna.massei@york.ac.uk

Handling Editor: Aaron Wirsing

Wildlife Research 51, WR23142 https://doi.org/10.1071/WR23142

Submitted: 5 November 2023 Accepted: 29 November 2023 Published: 5 January 2024

© 2024 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

The economic and environmental impacts of wildlife are increasing in parallel with renewed public interest in non-lethal methods, such as fertility control, to manage these impacts. The Wildlife Research 2008 Special Issue on Fertility Control for Wildlife (Vol. 35) published following the 6th International Conference on Fertility Control for Wildlife held in 2007 in York, United Kingdom, reported studies on the effects of contraceptives on individual animals and populations, with most papers focusing on ungulates. In the past 15 years, significant progress has been made in developing novel contraceptives for wildlife and in designing methods to deliver these agents. Concurrently, the general debate on wildlife management has widened to include public attitudes and perceptions of novel and traditional methods, animal welfare issues, costs, feasibility, and regulatory and ethical issues. These developments have broadened our understanding of contexts and species for which fertility control could be employed, either as a stand-alone method or to complement other population management options. These topics were reflected in the presentations given at the 9th International Conference on Wildlife Fertility Control, held in Colorado Springs (USA) in 2022. Here, we introduce a special issue featuring selected presentations from the 2022 conference. These studies showcase the wide spectrum of topics that covered novel contraceptives tested on several species, ranging from mice to elephants. They also illustrate new methods to deliver contraceptives, models on the impact of fertility control on populations, feasibility, cost of practical applications of fertility control, discussions on animal welfare and human dimension of these approaches.

Keywords: abundance, applied ecology, contraception, fertility control, population control, population management, reproduction, wildlife management.

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