Plein, Michaela, O'Brien, Katherine R., Holden, Matthew H., Adams, Matthew P., Baker, Christopher M., Bean, Nigel G., Sisson, Scott A., Bode, Michael, Mengersen, Kerrie L., and McDonald‐Madden, Eve
Cat removal is already underway, but there is concern that a decrease in the cat population could release predation pressure on rats, potentially leading to increased rat predation on red-tailed tropicbirds ( I Phaethon rubricauda i ) (Baker et al., 2020; Han et al., 2020). The metabolic demands of rats and cats (which included the mass of rats and cats) and the mass and energy of adult birds influenced the estimates of cat equivalence most strongly. For example, if reducing cat populations by 50% costs twice as much as reducing rats by 50%, but each cat is worth 77 rats, then our cat equivalence metric suggests that removing cats would be the most cost-effective strategy, but if cat equivalence is 30 then removing rats would be more effective. [Extracted from the article]