RT Journal Article
T1 Keeping an eye on the use of eye‑lens weight as a universal indicator of age for European wild rabbits
A1 Vaquerizas, Patricia
A1 Santoro, Simone
A1 Delibes Mateos, Miguel
A1 Castro, Francisca
A1 Villafuerte, Rafael
AB Accurate methods for age determination are critical to the knowledge of wildlife populations’ agestructure and, therefore, to their successful management. The reliability of age estimation may haveprofound economic and ecological consequences on the management of the European wild rabbits,Oryctolagus cuniculus, in its native and introduced range, where it is a keystone species and a majorpest, respectively. As in other mammal species, European rabbits’ age is often estimated using theGompertz relationship between age and lens’ weight. The growth rate formula has been developedbased on data collected from European rabbits introduced in Australia, where a single subspecies (O.cuniculus cuniculus, Occ) is present. However, this curve has never been validated in the species nativerange, the Iberian Peninsula, where two subspecies (Occ, and O. c. algirus, Oca) coexist naturally. Inthis study, we tested the relationship between age and lens’ weight using 173 Occ and 112 Oca wildrabbits that were surveyed in two experimental facilities in Spain. Our findings show that, in the nativerange, the published growth curve formula fits well Occ but not Oca data. Therefore, we recommendusing the formula reported in this study to estimate the age of Oca (Lens dry weight = 240 × 10(−64.9/(Age+32))). This study supports Oca rabbits’ distinctiveness revealed by previous studies, which suggeststhat management interventions should be applied to protect this subspecies whose distribution rangeis very narrow and whose populations seem to be declining. More broadly, our findings point to theimportance of testing the suitability of growth curves defined for other species with different geneticforms as occurs in the European wild rabbit case.
PB Nature Research
SN 2045-2322
YR 2021
FD 2021-04
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10272/19943
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10272/19943
LA eng
NO Vaquerizas, P. H., Santoro, S., Delibes Mateos, M., Castro, F., & Villafuerte, R. (2021). Keeping an eye on the use of eye-lens weight as a universal indicator of age for European wild rabbits. Scientific Reports, 11(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88087-w
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 31 may 2026