I am interested in reviewing the topic of small mammal mortality within discarded bottles, and information available is severily biased towards the northern hemisphere and in developed countries (USA and Western Europe). Does anyone has information from tropical areas? or from other continents?. This is surpising to me, because I know that discarded bottles is a aproblem worldwide (result of human development). There is information of discarded bottles as a potential source for some diseases like dengue or malaria (the rain water contained in bottles allow mosquitoes to lay their eggs). But nothing about small mammals dead inside bottles.
Thanks
This is simply a guess, but it may have to do with researcher effort in those areas. In other words, researchers in other areas may not be looking.
Related my field experience setting traps, the rodent communities in Southeast Asia are mainly dominated by big rodents (i.e.: genus Rattus, Bandicota), so probably bottles cannot act as trap for adult individuals.
I have not seen areas with discarded bottles, probably as they are collected to sell (glass and plastic), probably not happening this in the Northern hemisphere.
Probably this two factors can contribute in some way to this bias of information.
And L. Mike Conner comment can also be right.
Thanks Mike and Alexis,
very interesting points of view. I will have them into account when discussing our results.
regards
According to my field expierence, we used the plastic bootle as a trap to capture the small mammals, such as voles, shrews and the rondents, they would live a long time usually, at least one week; when we collected these traps in the field. Because, the traps had the insects as their foods.
Jiang,
please, explain a little bit more the procedure. I do not understand what are you doing. You place bottles as traps in the field with insects? or you place half-bottles like pitfall traps. You set traps for a week? Small mammals can live within bottles for a week?
If you have a paper describing the method please let me know.
thank you very much
Because I do the field survey on the small mammals in Guizhou Province, for example, the moles, and the shrews; we used the discared bottles as the traps, such as the 1.25L Coca, or some plastic tube, the diameter from 4cm to 10cm; the lasting time was 15 days usually, when we checked the traps after 3 days or 7 days, we could find the small mammals were alived, especially the rodents and the mole, also we could find some insects fallen in the traps. So, I think may be the insects were the food for these small mammals.
Jiang,
If you use plastic tube (which is open in both sides) it must be cut and buried in the ground to act as a trap, isn't it? So you are using pitfall traps? you cut the bottles and bury them? or you use the whole bottle laying on the ground?
Both of them we used in the filed, but the trap and the pitfall traps is useful, the whole bottle is not good for the small mammals captured, the successfully rate just 1.13%. and the animals could alive more than three days depend on its' body size, for example, shorter than 5 cm.
Jiang,
I am interested in your field investigations, and if you have any publication or report I will be grateful if you could send it to me.
Regards
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