King Rat: Will These Rodents Inherit The Earth?

King Rat: Will These Rodents Inherit the Earth?

By Mr Ghaz, 27 June 2010

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King Rat: Will These Rodents Inherit the Earth?

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Soon after World War II, the island of Engebi in the western Pacific was selected by the United States as a testing site for nuclear weapons. As a result, plants, animals, birds, and fish were completely destroyed or severely damaged by intensive radiation. When scientists ventured onto Engebi a few years later, they did not expect to find any normal, healthy life there.

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They were mistaken. Rats emerged from their burrows, fit as ever and with an even longer life span than they had before.

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Superrat

Fear of the “Superrat” is a staple of many horror movies, and with good reason. Rats have a phenomenal capacity to adapt and survive. Many groups of rats have already become immune to warfarin, a poison that prevents their blood clotting so that they bleed to death internally. Rats have adapted by developing blood that clots despite the poison; today they actually need to eat warfarin regularly to keep it from clotting too much.

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Rats are versatile and tough. They can squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter, climb almost any vertical surface, burrow through the earth, swim almost a mile even against a strong current, tread water for up to three days, jump as high as three feet, and drop from a height of 45 feet. Rats can kill quarry more than twice their own size and they can chew through live electrical cable.

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In addition, they seem to be intelligent, although it is more likely that they are just extremely wary. Legends about their shrewdness abound, but these are probably greatly exaggerated, the result of an age-old, and well-founded, fear.

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In 1348, rats brought the plague to Europe. They traveled in the holds of ships sailing from ports on the Black Sea to Genoa and carried the bacterium of fleas that lived in their coats. It is difficult to imagine the vast scope and the horror of the Black Death. The epidemic raged for three years and killed 25 million people, a quarter of the population of Europe. Over the next few decades, that number more than doubled. It can be said that rats changed the history of the world.

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Today rats continue to spread disease. They are responsible for typhus, trichinosis, Lassa fever, and salmonella. At the same time, they are valuable in testing new drugs in medical research. Docile when captive, rats require little space, reproduce very quickly, and will eat anything.

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Public Enemy No. 1?

Rats also wreak enormous damage. In the United States, they gnaw through more than $1 billion worth of property a year. Countless buildings are destroyed by fire because the rodents have stripped electrical cables with their teeth.

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In the country, rats feast on grain crops, chickens, ducks, geese, and even young lambs and pigs; in cities they gorge on garbage. In Asia rats pillage some 48 million tons of rice a year.

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Rats may be man’s worst enemy, but in some ways man is the rat’s best friends. Humans provide the warmth, shelter, and food on which rats thrive. And rat’s amazing capacity for reproduction always ensures that, no matter how many are eliminated, the next generation will quickly replace them. One male and one female can have as many as 15,000 descendants in a single year. 

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