LIFE PonDerat — Black Rat Eradication on Inhabited Ventotene Island (Pontine Archipelago, Italy)

The Pontine Archipelago (Ventotene, Santo Stefano, Palmarola, Zannone, Ponza), off Italy's Lazio coast, hosts key Mediterranean breeding colonies of Scopoli's and Yelkouan shearwaters, but introduced black rats (Rattus rattus) preyed on eggs and chicks and imposed direct costs on Ventotene's roughly 700 year-round residents.

From 2015 to 2022, the EU LIFE project "LIFE PonDerat" (LIFE14 NAT/IT/000544; total budget €1,788,216, EU contribution €1,072,930), led by Regione Lazio's Environment Directorate with ISPRA, the Ventotene & Santo Stefano Marine Protected Area authority, NEMO and Sapienza University of Rome, eradicated black rats from the inhabited island of Ventotene — reported as among the largest inhabited islands ever freed of rats worldwide.

A peer-reviewed 2024 study in Pest Management Science (Capizzi et al.) found Scopoli's shearwater breeding success rose from roughly 10% to over 90% within four years of eradication, while the rats had previously cost residents at least €18,500 per year through crop and structural damage, and multiple zoonotic pathogens carried by the rats were eliminated alongside them.

Eradicating rats from an inhabited island with domestic pets and mixed community support proved logistically harder than uninhabited-island campaigns, and sustained biosecurity is needed to prevent reinvasion via boat traffic from nearby, still-infested islands such as Ponza.

Read the full analysis: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38151297/