Credit: Saskia Keller, National Wildlife Health Center.
Six months ago, you began a program to develop a vaccine that will protect snakes from infection. This required extensive laboratory work to develop a potential vaccine and then experimentally test it on wild snakes. After all of that frantic research, you have amazing news to share with the world: the vaccine is 100% effective at preventing serious disease symptoms. When you vaccinated snakes and then exposed them to the fungus under natural conditions, none died, whereas unvaccinated and exposed snakes still had high mortality.
Congratulations! Your team's big success is featured on national and global news outlets, and you gain 3 charisma points. Unfortunately, even though you have an effective vaccine, it is still difficult to find and vaccinate susceptible snakes. In fact, you are sure that you will not be able to vaccinate enough snakes to hit the vaccination thresholds needed to eliminate the fungus from the snake community. But you hope that vaccination will buy enough time for other management options to be developed, especially if you target snakes along the invasion front. You assemble a huge team of herpetologists and veterinarians to travel throughout affected regions, looking for snakes to vaccinate. After all that hard work, you estimate that you were only able to vaccinate 30% of susceptible snakes. You can do this intervention again later if you have enough resources. In NetLogo, click the “vaccinate-snakes” button a single time, which should cause many blue dots to appear, indicating vaccinated individuals. Now advance 6 weeks/ticks and subtract $200,000 from your budget.
Option 1: Do another intervention.
Time Cost: Depends on which intervention you select
Monetary Cost: Depends on which intervention you select
Charisma Effect: Unknown
Option 2: Apply for more money for research or control efforts.
Time Cost: 4 Weeks/Ticks
Monetary Cost: $0
Charisma Effect: Unknown
Option 3: Do more research.
Time Cost: It depends on which research option you choose
Monetary Cost: It depends on which research option you choose
Charisma Effect: Unknown