Trojan Females and Judas Goats: Evolutionary Traps as Tools in Wildlife Management

Abstract

Evolutionary traps occur when rapid environmental change causes animals to prefer poor-quality resources (e.g., habitats) or behaviors over higher-quality ones that lead to greater survival or reproductive success. Here, we bring together science from the pest-control, eco-evolutionary, and conservation communities to outline how evolutionary traps can be repurposed to eliminate or control pest species. We highlight case studies and devise strategies for the selection of appropriate cues to manipulate, traits to target, and mechanisms to use in setting evolutionary traps that will most rapidly reduce animal abundance while preventing evolutionary escape. Approaches to setting evolutionary traps have been diverse but uneven with respect to principles that would make them more effective, such as strengthening resource preference, triggering out-of-context behaviors, and targeting underexploited sensory modalities. We find that evolutionary traps are demonstrably effective and unique tools with high target-species specificity that are deployable in concert with more traditional approaches.