Contributions to the development of effective food baits and pheromone lures for capturing mice and rats

My research aimed to improve trap captures of mice and rats by incorporating food cues and pheromone signals into a bait complex. I show that a food bait consisting of cereals, fructose, soy lecithin and a semiochemical blend in safflower oil, suspended in a gelatine/water solution, mediates feeding by mice and rats in the laboratory and capture of wild mice in the field. Traps baited with bedding soiled by caged male mice attracted juvenile and adult female mice, indicating the presence of a sex pheromone in soiled bedding. Analyses of male and female bedding odorants by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry show that the known primer pheromone components 3,4-dehydro-exo-brevicomin (DEB) and 2-sec-butyl-4,5-dihydrothiazole (DHT) were present in male bedding. In a field experiment, traps baited with DEB and DHT captured four times more female mice than corresponding control traps, indicating that DEB and DHT are sex attractant pheromone components of male house mice.