Ecology proteins
The US has recorded a record year in terms of the number of gray squirrels, so scientists are forced to stop the squirrel invasion and the only right way to do this is… contraception.
Thanks to the warm winter and a good harvest of nuts, a small population of squirrels has begun to grow, especially off the east coast, in the northeast and the midwest. Despite their sweet appearance, these animals can cause considerable damage to the environment by eating crops, chewing through building wires and damaging tree bark.
In order to stop the birth of rodents, contraception is the best option. But, of course, no protein will take daily pills, and there are no small spirals that can be given to females. What is a squirrel contraceptive?
Thanks to decades of contraceptive research for animal species such as white-tailed deer, squirrels have two options. You can use vaccination that stops proteins from producing sex hormones. Or you can lower their cholesterol levels, the molecules that make sex hormones. Plus, for this kind of contraception, just one injection is enough, and it will last for years.
“However, the problem is that you're going to have to take the time to catch the squirrels and give them these shots,” said Christi Yoder, an employee of the State Wildlife Research Center Colorado. It costs $50 to vaccinate one protein, including labor and the vaccine itself, and is quite expensive.
Therefore, researchers are thinking about the second option: to seduce protein into treats with contraceptives. This is the path scientists from Clemson University in South Carolina took. They give proteins cholesterol-lowering drugs called DiaZacon.
Before testing the drug on campus proteins, a team of researchers spent a year catching protein, taking blood tests from them, and testing when their hormones were are at the highest level.
This work was not exclusively scientific. The university campus has been fighting squirrels without success for about 10 years and has already lost more than 100 trees and a million dollars to plant new ones, as well as to recover from the damage that these rodents provide.
This year, scientists began to offer proteins sunflower seeds stuffed with the drug DiaZacon; squirrels love these seeds very much. They put seeds in 16 feeders across campus that were exclusively available for grey squirrels. The contraceptive was tested on experimental animals in the laboratory and was first used on wild proteins.
These seeds taste slightly different, and they are also pink because they contain a dye, and they probably taste a little sweeter than normal ones. However, squirrels don't seem to care, scientists said. Rodents ate seeds in large quantities.
Scientists will continue to supply protein with contraceptives next year, as well as monitor them and collect information about animal behavior. Take appropriate tests from them. In the end, they will receive all the data on how the drug works, whether the squirrels themselves or the predators that eat them have any side effects.
DiaZacon is coated with non-toxic pink paint, which, once in the animals' bodies, turns rodents' bellies pink, so it's easier for scientists to understand who has already taken the medicine and who has not. They also reported that all squirrels on campus already have pink bellies.