VIU student study examines month

Rabbit Advocacy Animal Matters

VIU student study examines monthly rabbit population cycle trends over 10-month period

October 6, 2011 Nanaimo Daily News

A rabbit study now underway at Vancouver Island University is tracking bunny population trends on the Nanaimo campus. Since June a fourth-year biology student has been trapping, tagging and re-releasing feral rabbits, then counting them and tracking their movements.

There was a huge outcry when University of Victoria proposed culling an exploding rabbit population at UVic, so in the fall of 2010 all feral rabbits on the campus were trapped, sterilized and relocated to Coombs, Texas or Washington State.

No one is currently proposing a cull for VIU, and nor is it expected any time soon. Should the topic arise it would be useful to at least know how large the rabbit population is, for starters. "The fact is, we don't even know how many rabbits there are on campus," said Liz Gillis, faculty supervisor of VIU's resource management officers technology program. Gillis suggested the study to Megan Jenkins, who was looking for a topic for an ecological project earlier this year.

Gillis chooses her words carefully describing the project, sensitive to public reaction to how the animal are treated. "They're in the traps usually less than half an hour, during which time they eat apples," Gillis said. "We're very aware of what happened in UVic."