On the front lines of humanity’s high-tech war on rats

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/13/8592817/rat-patrol-new-york-alberta-canada-south-georgia-eradication

by Petiver • 11 years ago

81 32 11 years ago

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

I had not realized that there was anywhere in North America that was "rat free". Would love to make Sunnyvale rat free but with all the old orchards and what not I doubt that is feasible.

goodcanadian• 11 years ago

Part of the reason that they can be controlled in Alberta is that they can't survive the winter outside of human structures. Combined with the fact that the border areas are relatively sparsely populated farmland, it is more a case of eradicating small isolated populations than controlling rats en masse. The rats can do a bit of "island hopping" in the summers, so an active campaign has to be maintained to keep them out.

The other reason that it is possible to maintain, of course, is the fact that the decision was made BEFORE rats invaded.

screwedup• 11 years ago

Anecdotally I've been told that Alberta has some rats, they just keep on telling outsiders that they don't.

diego_moita• 11 years ago

I live in Edmonton, Alberta. In the last 10 years the only rats I've seen are the ones used in the neuroscience labs at the University of Alberta.

In truth, my house got a infestation of the smaller deer mouse [1], 2 years ago. But they are indigenous to Alberta and much smaller and easier to catch than the brown rat. It was quite easy to get rid of them, a cleaning in the garage and some traps did it.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peromyscus

soperj• 11 years ago

I lived there for decades and never saw a rat. I guarantee they have rat infestations occasionally, but they are caught and eradicated pretty quickly. I know they had one down near Lethbridge recently, but I think it turned out to be pet rats that were let loose and started breeding.

pkfrank2• 11 years ago

This was an unexpectedly fascinating read. This blew my mind:

Rats are responsible for about half of all bird and reptile extinctions on islands, according to Gregg Howald of the group Island Conservation.

I live in the LES of NYC, and will routinely see 50+ rats in a 10 block span. They have massive burrows through a local park, with ample opportunity to live and breed, and a constant supply of trash and food (sometimes left "for the birds.")

One small benefit is that they prove a consistent supply of food for the local park's hawks, which can regularly be seen feasting on them.

Here's a cool video of hunting dogs attacking a rat burrow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxQksEF2uso

stinos• 11 years ago

This blew my mind

not from this article but from a documentary I once saw, and equally if not more mindblowing, it is estimated that about 20% of the entire world food supply goes to rats

fudged71• 11 years ago

So their eradication could be a solution to the food crisis? Interesting thought.

nostromo• 11 years ago

That's the problem with prolific rat poison use in NYC -- it also poisons the birds who eat the rats.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/nyregion/rat-poison-is-fou...

unpixer• 11 years ago

If you're on the LES and enjoyed the article, you might also enjoy Robert Sullivan's Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants (Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Rats-Observations-History-Unwanted-Inh...).

pkfrank2• 11 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out!

pavel_lishin• 11 years ago

This is incredible.

* The Norway rat has a three-week gestation period and can produce five litters a year, each with four to eight offspring. In as few as three months, those rats can produce litters of their own. In theory, a single pair is capable of giving rise to thousands of progeny in under a year.*
But then came the sealers, and they brought the rats, which devoured the birds: eating eggs, chicks, and even fully grown birds, Martin said, grabbing their necks and devouring their brains while still alive.

I can't even imagine seeing that.

rpcope1• 11 years ago

On a related note, brown rats make excellent pets, just so long as you don't let them breed and have your own population problems. I guess it's no surprise they're as prolific as they are, when they're probably the smartest small mammal out there and incredibly resilient to just about everything at that. My own rats answer to names and can perform simple tricks, sort of miles ahead intellectually than any other animal their size. They're also very loving animals, once they get to know you.

aerique• 11 years ago

And breed they can! If a male rat as much as touches a female rat -even through the bars of a cage- you can consider the female impregnated.

But, yeah, they're awesome pets.

s_baby• 11 years ago

I've owned many rodents throughout my childhood. Rats were by far the most interested in socially engaging and bonding with me. It was almost like having a dog.

tehchromic• 11 years ago

And the irony is that it's humans who are directly responsible for the rat scourge.

barrydahlberg4• 11 years ago

I live in New Zealand and spend some time in our back country deer stalking, trout fishing and exploring.

NZ uses about 80% of the worlds supply of 1080 poison[1] and our next trip is into one of the areas where it is dropped every few years. 1080 is a horrible thing and I hate what we do with it. It kills animals it wasn't meant for, it makes game unsafe to eat and it's not a pleasant way to go. However I love NZ because of what nature has given us here, and unfortunately the poison is currently the best tool we have to protect the birds that we have left. Trapping and hunting are useful tools but we have so much remote, inaccessible wilderness that it is not feasible on its own.

I would love to see more innovation in tools to control the rats, the possums, the stoats and other small mammals that NZ grew up without and doesn't know how to handle. I'm hoping that new technology coming from start ups like we have here will bring new ideas and techniques. A major challenge will be taking those ideas and adapting them to work reliably in remote and harsh conditions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080_usage_in_New_Zealand

mapt2• 11 years ago

It makes a hell of a lot of sense to use these things in a credible, short-term 100% extermination drive, supplemented by other methods including hunting. We've extirpated animals like this before, like the wolves of North America.

But... it's a mammalian toxin. Humans are mammals. I don't understand why you would want to reintroduce it into your home every year as some kind of maintenance activity.

leohutson• 11 years ago

The bait drops are restricted to within park boundaries. Within those bounds there should be no mammals, save for humans who know better than to eat bait pellets, and perhaps the occasional muzzled dog ( with a permit ). There is a by-kill of native animals, but that pales in comparison to the amount that would be killed by unchecked predator growth. No human has been killed or harmed by DOC 1080 drops.

http://www.forestandbird.org.nz/saving-our-environment/nativ...

The main opponents to 1080 are hunters, nimbies and people that believe in chem-trails and threaten to poison milk formula.

Hunters I can empathize with to some degree, but in the end, they have a vested interest in preserving the populations of feral animals, not in the elimination of them.

barrydahlberg4• 11 years ago

Note we have some offshore islands etc where 100% kill has been achieved. We're not even close to being able to achieve that on the mainland though.

danmaz74• 11 years ago

Wolves are big. Rats are small. It's a fundamental difference when you think about exterminating some animal.

saurik• 11 years ago

"The Big Kill: New Zealand's Crusade to Rid Itself of Mammals"

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/big-kill

hyperion2010• 11 years ago

Genetically engineer them so that they don't act as disease vectors (those ones will out-compete the unmodified strains) and stick in a set of genes that allows use to use a very specific poison that will only kill the rats and nothing else. Put the poison in or near the food sources we don't want them to get in to and then let them be our little garbage men for the rest of time.

beloch• 11 years ago

I grew up in Alberta and can recall only the occasional bit of anti-rat propaganda. The province's status as a rat-free zone is something most natives of the province view as a curious, obscure fact. Most take it for granted. I can remember once viewing the rat-patrol as a vanity project, thinking that mice (which the province does have) were the same, only smaller. We also have gophers (Richardson’s ground squirrel), which are larger than rats and truly industrious tunnellers. I once thought that the province was kept rat-free with great ease and only as a minor boon for tourism, or some such nonsense. The only time I've seen rats in Alberta was in a zoology course where we conducted some basic experiments on them. Lab rats are white and well-looked after, almost like pets. They bear almost no resemblance to wild norwegian browns.

Then I travelled abroad and encountered real rats. They're dirty, disgusting, and bold. Alberta's gophers, outside of populated areas, are as bold as rats. They'll chew their way inside your pack to get at your lunch, and I've even had my lunch stolen from my hand because I unwittingly held a sandwich near the ground without paying attention to what was creeping up behind me! Gophers are a blight on farmers and horses can supposedly break their legs in their holes, although I suspect this is a rare occurence. However, they aren't vectors for disease and, in spite of all the damage they cause, don't make your skin crawl the way rats do. Some people (tourists usually) deliberately feed gophers. Japan even had a brief gopher craze where they bought them as pets (it's illegal to export pests, so nobody here was able to cash in on that craze). Gophers are also substantially shier in populated areas and generally live outside in parks, not within homes.

Reading this article has reinforced my support for the rat-patrol. They're doing important work. I think I'll send them a thank-you.

mentos• 11 years ago

Would it be possible to do what they've done with mosquitoes and engineer male rats that will mate with females but not create viable offspring?

wtbob• 11 years ago

I'm unclear why _humanity_ (i.e., the quality of being humane) would be at war with rats, as it's kinda like multiplication being at war with apples, although I can see why _mankind_ (i.e., human beings) would.

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

What you call "mankind" -- which is indeed among the appropriate names for it -- is also a definition of "humanity", as perusing any decent dictionary would reveal.

Better pedants, please.

kbart• 11 years ago

Because it's mankind's fault that the rat population is booming and invading places they naturally are not supposed to be, killing nearly all native species along the way. Not to mention carrying diseases one of which once happened to kill more than half of total Europe's population.. This article does a pretty good job explaining that, try reading it.

On the front lines of humanity’s high-tech war on rats

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