Awarded to Dr Dave Algar, principal scientist at the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, Western Australia, who has spearheaded efforts to reduce the impacts of feral cats in Western Australia.
Dr Algar led the team that developed ERADICAT, a bait now used in Western Australia for feral cat control, where most native mammals have a high tolerance to 1080. Prior to this there was no cat-specific bait available for use in Australia.
ERADICAT is made mainly of kangaroo meat that looks like a chipolata sausage and injected with the toxin sodium monofluoroacetate (1080). ERADICAT has been shown to provide effective and sustained control of cat populations at the landscape level, allowing the survival of small mammals hunted by cats.
Dave was also the driving force for the eradication of feral cats from the 62,000 hectare Dirk Hartog Island. The island, a national park in the Shark Bay World Heritage Area, had lost 10 of its 13 ground-dwelling mammal species due to predation by feral cats and the impacts of sheep and goats.
The last feral cat was removed from the island in October 2016 and 46,000 km of monitoring and 114,684 camera trap nights have confirmed success, which was independently confirmed by Island Conservation in 2018. This was the largest eradication of feral cats from an island in the world and means that all of Western Australia’s islands are free of feral cats.
The success of this eradication along with the removal of goats and sheep has inspired Return to 1616, an ecological restoration program that would see the reintroduction to Dirk Hartog Island of lost mammal species and the recovery of the ecosystems to a time before European occupation.
Dave represents the Western Australian government on the national feral cat taskforce and is now working to eradicate feral cats from Christmas Island.