DoC habitually, publicly and aggressively misrepresents what its research shows. A typical example recently occurred on the national radio programme Radio New Zealand.
Al Morrison, Director General of DoC, stated that if we want to have kiwis, then 1080 is the price.This assertion borders on the absurd.There is not one stitch of scientific evidence showing that applications of aerial 1080 benefit kiwis, and there is a sound scientific argument that they may be profoundly harmful.
In another example, DoC claims in its ERMA submission “that robin nesting success more than compensates for any robin losses from 1080”.This is not born out by the evidence.The study that DoC cites showed increased nesting success in 1 of 3 years, but even that single success failed to translate into increased robin population success -- the real bottom line.The study also showed that 54% of banded robins died in the 1080 poisoned area compared to none in the un-poisoned area.
DoC claims that the tomtit, a ground feeding native bird, is not affected by aerial 1080 bait, and cites a study done by Westbrooke in 2005 to prove that.However, the data in the published paper actually shows that substantial numbers of tomtits could be being killed even by low concentration cereal baits, and much more important it shows that about 40% of tomtits died when exposed to low concentration carrot baits!Yet this is never mentioned by DoC (or by the Forests and Birds organization, DoC’s principle apologist), nor is it mentioned in the Abstract section of the paper.Carrot bait is still in widespread use by DoC.
DoC claims that bats are unaffected by aerial 1080.However, a well done 2002 study by Lloyd and McQueen showed that bats were clearly poisoned secondarily by eating affected insects.The study gave a “best estimate” that 14% of bats would be killed in 14 foraging flights in a 1080 poisoned area, and who knows what the long term sublethal effects would be of the repeated exposures to which DoC subjects them.
There is even substantial evidence that DoC has suppressed critical research unfavourable to its aerial 1080 agenda.This research on invertebrates, the category of animals that includes insects, worms and spiders is perhaps the most disturbing.In 1992, M Meads completed a study for DoC that showed approximately 50% mortality among forest invertebrates, in particular insects from a single aerial 1080 “treatment”.The most severely affected species included beetles, bees, ants, butterflies, moths, springtails, flies and spiders.
DoC refused to allow the resulting paper to be published. At the same time they commissioned a similar study which was structured to have virtually no chance of detecting the high mortality seen in the Meads study. The resulting poorly designed and analyzed study remains the sole evidence that New Zealand’s indiscriminate use of a poison originally developed as an insecticide is not devastating our forest invertebrates.
The implications of this are truly disturbing given that insects and other invertebrates are the backbone of forest ecosystems and given that DoC is mandated by law to protect native species and biodiversity.In fact DoC’s use of aerial 1080 over the intervening 15 years has probably already done irreversible damage to the diversity of our native invertebrates. If there were no truth in the rest of this article, this point alone should be enough to bring an immediate halt to the poisoning of our forests with 1080.
The misrepresentation, distortion, suppression and biased reporting live in a hierarchy.To illustrate this we will analyze a claim in considerable detail, more than is desirable for easy reading, but we believe that this level of granularity is essential to make the point tangible.We could have picked any of hundreds of such claims, but this one is typical both in respect to the quality of the science and its relationship to the claims made for it.Consider an assertion that we recently received by email from a member of the F&B Society:
“…without 1080 we have lost parakeets, kaka, kokako, blue duck and at least 5 native forest plants at Aongatete in the Kaimai. With 1080 we have recovered kokako, kaka, parakeets and blue duck at Pureora and kaka at Whirinaki … anybody advocating against 1080 at this juncture is putting our natural heritage at risk. To do so is hypocracy [sic] at the best and sabotage at the worst.”
We could find only one study that deserved the name and that examined the effect of aerial 1080 on the populations of kaka and kereru (also known as kukupa) in Whirinaki Forest Park.In the study, Powlesland et al radio-tagged the birds and used one poisoned area and one unpoisoned control area and tracked these birds over three breeding seasons following poisoning in one area and observation only in the single control area.
Hence from its basic design, this study contains a fatal statistical error, namely lack of replication and/or randomisation of study and control areas.In addition, when the authors reported on the nesting success and fledgling survival for the radio-tagged birds, incredibly, the authors did not distinguish the data from the poisoned and unpoisoned areas.
Instead they only reported the combined results from both the treatment and non-treatment areas. This extraordinary choice is not justified in the text.One wonders what the data actually show that the authors were so anxious not to report.In any case, this study demonstrates absolutely nothing about the impact of aerial 1080 on the nesting success or populations of kaka and kereru.Despite this the authors (who were, as usual, sponsored by DoC) go on to conclude in the last sentence of the paper’s abstract.
Effective control of introduced mammalian predators … should benefit these bird populations.
Given this level of biased reporting, it is curious that the authors did not just falsify the results and have done with it.
On the other hand, there were some interesting observations derivable from the study’s reported data that shed considerable doubt on the rationale used by DoC to justify their $80 million per year pest control efforts.One observation was that rat population numbers recovered within 14 months of the poisoning relative to the non-poisoned area.This is, of course, expected given the remarkable reproductive capacity of rats, but it flies directly in the face of DoC’s claims that populations of birds will benefit from triennial poisoning of the forest with aerial 1080.
Another observation was that mustelid (stoat) numbers actually seemed to increase in the treatment area.Why this happened is uncertain, but the phenomenon has variably been noted in other studies.Of course, one can imagine scenarios wherein poisoning of the forest might result in such a result, e.g., dead bird carcasses provide easy food for mustelids or competition for food from rats and possums is decreased.Regardless, more mustelids would not seem to bode well for native birds as mustelids are known to be major predators of native birds and their eggs.
With perspicacity, Zavaleta, a respected international ecologist, pointed out the principle grammar school student of the essentially cybernetic nature of ecosystems (a characteristic all but ignored in DoC’s simplistic, univariate view):
When exotic predators and prey co-occur, eradication of only the exotic prey can also cause problems by forcing the predator to switch to native prey. In New Zealand, introduced rats R. rattus and possums Trichosurus vulpecular are an important part of the diet of the stoat Mustela ermina, an exotic mustelid. Efforts to remove all three species by poisoning the prey species had an unexpected result: the stoat populations were not eliminated by either the prey eradication or the poison application and, in the absence of abundant exotic prey, the stoats switched their diets to native birds and bird eggs.
Or as Murphy et al put it:
Stoats shifted between eating rats and birds, depending upon the abundance of rats. Thus successful rat-poisoning operations resulted in higher bird consumption than unsuccessful ones. Combining the numerical and functional responses of stoats into a 'bird predation index' showed that stoats are likely to have the greatest effect on birds after successful 1080 poison operations.
So how did Powlesland, et al react to their and others’ evidence of increased numbers of stoats?Essentially, they ignored it, but this did not prevent LCR employee John McLennan from claiming in a NZ Herald article that 1080 is “having marked success in controlling rats and stoats and helping kiwi populations grow.”Of course McLennan cited only an unpublished, unrandomised, unblinded, statistically moot “study” which did not pretend, even anecdotally, to show a differential effect on kiwi populations.
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