Management Responses

Management actions against invasive herpetofauna have slowly increased as awareness of their impacts has advanced, although management has not yet pro gressed to the level of routine success that frequently characterizes actions against invasive mammals or plants. Logically, alien herpetofaunal management may occur at any of the three stages of the invasion process discussed in Chapter 1: preventing introductions from occurring, establishing early-detection and rapid-response pro grams to eradicate incipient populations, or managing well-established pests long-term so as to mitigate their worst effects. As for other alien species, impact reduction will most effectively be achieved by having a strong prevention program to keep herpetofauna from travelling and naturalizing outside their native ranges. To create such a program involves knowing the details of how species are trans ported by humans, and research requirements to meet that need will be examined in the next chapter. However, prevention programs can never be perfect barriers to introduction, so it also remains important to determine to what extent eradication and long-term control programs may prove effective against naturalized herpeto-faunal populations. Relatively few attempts have been made in this direction, and they are not widely publicized, but I review here the instances of which I am aware.