Do Now: Work together to name some mammals that you would consider as pests.

Do Now: Work together to name some mammals that you would consider as pests.

How do you think mammals can harm a garden?

• How can a mammal affect a vegetable garden?

• How can a mammal affect a flower garden?– Bulb plants

Voles, a.k.a. Meadow Mice

• Voles are digging rodents

• Voles resemble a typical house mice. Voles are generally gray-brown with gray undersides. Adult voles are about 4 to 5 inches long with reduced tails (1/2 to 1 inch long) and reduced legs. Voles can be very prolific. Voles have litters of 3-7 young. Young reach reproductive maturity in as few as 21 days. Given good conditions, voles can breed throughout the year with peak breeding occurring in spring.

Describe how vole activity could damage your garden or lawn

Subterranean tunnels made by voles

• Voles tend to be found in grassy open fields– Why do you think voles prefer grassy areas?• Hint: Food? Wild grass is not short like in our yards,

how could un-mowed grass be good for a vole?

• How would you control a vole population?

• Rodenticides work,– Hypothesize what would happen when a vole that

just ate bait with rodenticide is out in the open and becomes visible• Hint: think in terms of things that eat voles

• Voles tunnel right up to the main roots and trunks of fruit-bearing trees and gnaw on bark at the soil interface, sometimes girdling and killing the tree.

• How would you protect trees from voles?

Rats and Mice

• They eat anything we eat so our gardens are a target

• They often dig just-planted seeds or feed on ripening crops

• How could you avoid losing garden plants to mice and rats?– Find multiple ways to stop these pests.

White footed mouse

House mouse

Do the Math• Mice are mature enough to become pregnant at 4

weeks old.• They can have 12 or more babies per litter• Females can become pregnant as soon as they give

birth• It takes 19-23 days from impregnation to birth

• If they all survived, how many mice would you have in 1 month, what about 2 months?

• Imagine all those hungry little mouths in your garden

Rat Attack• In southeast Asia bamboo forests are

widespread, and adjacent to farms and villages.• It flowers once every 48 years. All the plants of

the same bamboo species, from all over southeast Asia will flower at the same time.

• In which plant family is bamboo in?• What comes after flowering?• How will the sudden flowering of millions of

bamboo plants affect the Black Rat population?

Flowering Bamboo

Never underestimate a Rat• After the bamboo has made seeds, it all dies. • How would you describe the condition of the food

supply for the rats of the bamboo forests after the bamboo dies?

• Where will the black rats go to feed then?

• How does this affect the human food supply?

• The black rat is ready to reproduce after 2-3 months of life. It can reproduce 3-4 times a year, each time producing a litter of 4-8 pups. Do the Math.

• This happens every 48 years, a plague of rats followed by famine. It is called the Mautam.

• When this happened in the 1950’s the local starving populations revolted causing lots of violence.

Easter Island

• Once a lush tropical pacific Island, with many trees.

• Polynesians moved in and brought with them the Pacific Rat. probably as a food source.

• There were no rats on Easter Island.

• What problems can you predict given this situation?• Homework, find out what happened to the forests of

Easter Island

• The Polynesians built these giant statues and moved them to their current positions using lumber

The Moai