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Keeping an eye on the use of eye-lens weight as a universal indicator of age for European wild rabbits
Accurate methods for age determination are critical to the knowledge of wildlife populations' age structure and, therefore, to their successful management. The reliability of age estimation may have profound economic and ecological consequences on the management of the European wild rabbits, Or...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8062486/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33888785 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88087-w |
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author | Vaquerizas, Patricia H. Santoro, Simone Delibes-Mateos, Miguel Castro, Francisca Villafuerte, Rafael |
author_facet | Vaquerizas, Patricia H. Santoro, Simone Delibes-Mateos, Miguel Castro, Francisca Villafuerte, Rafael |
author_sort | Vaquerizas, Patricia H. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Accurate methods for age determination are critical to the knowledge of wildlife populations' age structure and, therefore, to their successful management. The reliability of age estimation may have profound economic and ecological consequences on the management of the European wild rabbits, Oryctolagus cuniculus, in its native and introduced range, where it is a keystone species and a major pest, respectively. As in other mammal species, European rabbits' age is often estimated using the Gompertz relationship between age and lens' weight. The growth rate formula has been developed based on data collected from European rabbits introduced in Australia, where a single subspecies (O. cuniculus cuniculus, Occ) is present. However, this curve has never been validated in the species native range, the Iberian Peninsula, where two subspecies (Occ, and O. c. algirus, Oca) coexist naturally. In this study, we tested the relationship between age and lens' weight using 173 Occ and 112 Oca wild rabbits that were surveyed in two experimental facilities in Spain. Our findings show that, in the native range, the published growth curve formula fits well Occ but not Oca data. Therefore, we recommend using the formula reported in this study to estimate the age of Oca (Lens dry weight = 240 × 10((−64.9/(Age+32)))). This study supports Oca rabbits' distinctiveness revealed by previous studies, which suggests that management interventions should be applied to protect this subspecies whose distribution range is very narrow and whose populations seem to be declining. More broadly, our findings point to the importance of testing the suitability of growth curves defined for other species with different genetic forms as occurs in the European wild rabbit case. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8062486 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-80624862021-04-23 Keeping an eye on the use of eye-lens weight as a universal indicator of age for European wild rabbits Vaquerizas, Patricia H. Santoro, Simone Delibes-Mateos, Miguel Castro, Francisca Villafuerte, Rafael Sci Rep Article Accurate methods for age determination are critical to the knowledge of wildlife populations' age structure and, therefore, to their successful management. The reliability of age estimation may have profound economic and ecological consequences on the management of the European wild rabbits, Oryctolagus cuniculus, in its native and introduced range, where it is a keystone species and a major pest, respectively. As in other mammal species, European rabbits' age is often estimated using the Gompertz relationship between age and lens' weight. The growth rate formula has been developed based on data collected from European rabbits introduced in Australia, where a single subspecies (O. cuniculus cuniculus, Occ) is present. However, this curve has never been validated in the species native range, the Iberian Peninsula, where two subspecies (Occ, and O. c. algirus, Oca) coexist naturally. In this study, we tested the relationship between age and lens' weight using 173 Occ and 112 Oca wild rabbits that were surveyed in two experimental facilities in Spain. Our findings show that, in the native range, the published growth curve formula fits well Occ but not Oca data. Therefore, we recommend using the formula reported in this study to estimate the age of Oca (Lens dry weight = 240 × 10((−64.9/(Age+32)))). This study supports Oca rabbits' distinctiveness revealed by previous studies, which suggests that management interventions should be applied to protect this subspecies whose distribution range is very narrow and whose populations seem to be declining. More broadly, our findings point to the importance of testing the suitability of growth curves defined for other species with different genetic forms as occurs in the European wild rabbit case. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-04-22 /pmc/articles/PMC8062486/ /pubmed/33888785 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88087-w Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Vaquerizas, Patricia H. Santoro, Simone Delibes-Mateos, Miguel Castro, Francisca Villafuerte, Rafael Keeping an eye on the use of eye-lens weight as a universal indicator of age for European wild rabbits |
title | Keeping an eye on the use of eye-lens weight as a universal indicator of age for European wild rabbits |
title_full | Keeping an eye on the use of eye-lens weight as a universal indicator of age for European wild rabbits |
title_fullStr | Keeping an eye on the use of eye-lens weight as a universal indicator of age for European wild rabbits |
title_full_unstemmed | Keeping an eye on the use of eye-lens weight as a universal indicator of age for European wild rabbits |
title_short | Keeping an eye on the use of eye-lens weight as a universal indicator of age for European wild rabbits |
title_sort | keeping an eye on the use of eye-lens weight as a universal indicator of age for european wild rabbits |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8062486/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33888785 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88087-w |
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