The first set of traps were given to students in North Dunedin last week as part of the City Sanctuary project, which aims to see Dunedin become the first city to normalise community-led, city-wide predator control in backyards and public reserves.
The project is one of three Predator Free Dunedin projects and is being delivered by the Dunedin City Council.
City Sanctuary operations supervisor Catherine Bradley said the majority of students reported in an Orientation Week survey that they had a problem with rats.
Supplying students with traps meant they could solve their own rat problems while contributing data on how efficient traps were in different communities around the city, Mrs Bradley said.
The purpose of the project was to understand how people felt about trapping, which would help develop a process for eradication in the future.
‘‘North Dunedin is a learning site for us to see how engaged people are with the traps.’’
Information gathered from the project would help establish long-term sustainable trapping methods for the suburb.
There would be 86 traps distributed in total, which equated to one in 10 homes in the area.
Half would be advanced Goodnature A24 traps, which were self-resetting and dispensed a rodent-specific odour to lure the predators.
The traps would also record each time they were triggered and wirelessly send that information to City Sanctuary and the trap hosts using Bluetooth, Mrs Bradley said.
The other half of the traps would be traditional plastic snap traps in wooden boxes.
North Dunedin was the second of three sites in the project.
Seventy-six traps were distributed in Maori Hill last year and there were plans to supply Caversham with 196 traps later this year.
Each of the sites would run for one year. However, it would vary for North Dunedin as many students changed flats at the end of the year, she said.
Ecology and zoology student Bradley Thomas, who lives in Leith St, said he was happy to be hosting a trap as there were ‘‘definitely’’ rats in the area.
He had not caught anything since he set up the traditional snap trap last week but his neighbour, who was also part of the project, had caught a mouse.
City Sanctuary gave him training on how to use the trap, and helped him find the best location outside his flat for catching rats.
All he had to do to help the project was maintain his trap and log any rodents he caught online, he said.
