Product creates infertile female mice | Company says the aim isn’t to eradicate a rodent population but to reduce it enough so it’s not a problem
There’s a quiet, furtive menace nibbling away at crop and livestock production that few farmers admit is a serious problem.
“Nobody really wants to say, ‘I have mice in my poultry barn carrying salmonella.’ The same goes for farmers with swine dysentery and farmers with crop damage,” SenesTech chief executive officer Loretta Mayer said during the Agri Innovation Forum held in Winnipeg.
Mayer said in an interview that rodents damage crops, spread poison and carry disease into livestock facilities.
Her company produces non-lethal rodent control that is used from rice paddies and palm plantations in the Philippines to rangeland in Australia and the subway system in New York City.
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The product is based on research that grew out of Mayer’s expertise in human female post-menopausal health.
While working as an academic medical researcher, Mayer found a way to create infertile female mice by chemically causing them to experience menopause.
She did this so that she would have living creatures for medical experiments to develop products to help human females, but the pest control potential soon became obvious.
Making mice and rats experience menopause stops their breeding and eliminates the spiraling population increase in most infestations.
“We accelerate that natural process of aging the gonad,” she said during her presentation to the conference.
Mayer said her company doesn’t aim to totally eliminate rodents. Doing that would create the “rebound effect,” in which nearby rodents quickly move into an uninfested area containing food.
However, a few infertile rodents left in an area will defend their territory against other rodents but won’t increase their population.
SenesTech is already working with hog producers in North Carolina, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and large agricultural and pest control companies.
Mayer said farmers don’t often talk about rodent problems, but the animals’ ability to be a vector of disease worries many.
“I don’t care how many times you shower in and shower out of these facilities, it’s going to spoil your day when you find a rat that’s carrying swine dysentery,” said Mayer.
She attended the Nov. 19-20 conference to promote investment in her company, hoping to find investors in its equity and licensees to market its products around the world.
