The discarded slices of pizza that litter New York’s streets have long fueled its sizeable population of rats, but now the city’s growing swarm has a new reason to enjoy their home — warmer temperatures.
City officials have reported an increasing number of calls from residents complaining about rats and have warned that milder winters are helping them feed and mate longer into the year, and as winters warm up, more frequent outdoor activity by people is adding to the litter rats thrive upon.
Rat-related complaints have been on the rise over the past four years, with 19,152 calls made to the city last year, an increase of about 10 percent on 2016.
Photo: AP
There are no reliable figures on the number of rats in New York — estimates range from 250,000 to tens of millions — but the surge in rat activity has been replicated in other US cities.
Houston, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia have experienced large increases in calls to pest control.
Veteran anti-rat strategists have, in part, blamed climate change.
“It’s a complex issue, but we are seeing rat population increases around the world now,” said Bobby Corrigan, a sought-after rat-catching consultant who once spent a week living in a rat-infested barn in Indiana as part of his doctoral research.
“Requests for my services are through the roof, I can’t keep up with them,” Corrigan said. “You speak to any health commissioner from Boston to [Washington] DC and the trend is upwards.”
“In winter rats slow down their reproduction because it’s so cold, but they are probably having one more litter a year now because it’s getting warmer,” he said. “A litter is around 10 babies and that’s making a difference.”
Mike Deutsch, a veteran rat-catcher at New York-based Arrow Exterminating Co, said that warmer temperatures are having a “natural consequence.”
“As the Earth warms, you’ll have more activity, more rats about,” Deutsch said. “They won’t be able to keep growing if there’s not enough food or shelter for them, but you’ll see populations rise.”
Deutsch — whose research has found that, contrary to popular belief, cats are not very good at catching rats — also pointed to other factors, such as urban construction that has disturbed rat families, making them more visible.
The increase in rat sightings has spawned viral videos of rats eating pizza and navigating escalators, but has also raised health concerns.
A death was recorded in the Bronx last year due to leptospirosis, a rare disease transmitted via rat urine.
New York rats trapped and tested by Columbia University researchers were found to be reservoirs of Escherichia coli and salmonella, with some even carrying Seoul hantavirus, which can cause kidney failure.
The city’s response has been muscular.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio last year unveiled a US$32 million plan to launch a mass slaughter of rats in infested areas, such as Chinatown and East Village.
New York City makes about 100,000 inspections for rat activity each year and exterminators gas rats to death in their burrows, rather than poison them, because of fears over affecting other wildlife.
De Blasio said that he has seen “many a rat” in the city.
“I see them in the parks and in the subway. We’re kind to rats. We just want them to go away,” he said.
However, New York is likely to remain a haven for rats because of its large population, sprawl of hole-ridden buildings and copious waste.
“There are mountains of garbage in the city and the rats are saying: ‘Thanks, we’ll bite through that and eat at will,’” Corrigan said. “We are at war, but we don’t have weapons to fight the war.”
“We could get the rat numbers down to tolerable levels, but we need to rethink our whole system of doing things,” he said.
“There are litter baskets all over New York City and every night you see rats in there gorging themselves because it’s easy,” he said. “The rats are taking advantage of our weaknesses.”
Rats have become so ingrained in the fabric of New York life that researchers have discovered genetically distinct “uptown” and “downtown” rats.
Even those tasked with killing rats recognize that they will never be eliminated from the New York experience.
An anonymous advertising copywriter, who calls herself the “Elena Ferrante of rats,” offers an unusual online gifting service where she will exterminate rats for a fee, providing a certificate to mark the kill.
“I don’t have it out for rats. I think they’re pretty impressive,” she told reporters. “There’s just too many of them.”
Deutsch, who has caught rats in places as diverse as Arizona and on cruise ships meandering around Europe, said that he has developed “a relationship with rats.”
“They are an incredible animal, I admire their ability to adapt to different situations,” he said. “I look at them as a tremendous success.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS