Skip to main content

Rats have been in New York City since the 1700s and they're never leaving

[ad_1]


Since the late 1700s, Norwegian rats have haunted New York City’s alleys, parks, and basements. They came on ships from France and England, and then they never left.



Matthew Combs, a graduate student at Fordham University, didn’t just want to learn about the history of those rats. He also investigated how their families move around the city, and found that certain areas had more genetic diversity. The Lower East side and East Harlem had more movement of genes between rats, while Midtown (especially west) had less. The residential areas of the city provide better homes for the rats than the more touristy areas. Better habitats mean more rat babies, which leads to the more frequent DNA mutations that Combs measured.



The Norwegian rat, or brown rat, paradoxically originated in Asia, then spread through the Middle East to Europe and Africa. Combs found that a population from England or France made their way to New York City sometime between 1750 and 1770. Even after the U.S. started to trade with Asia and Africa, other rodent species were unable to gain a foothold.



Robert Corrigan, an urban rodentologist and consultant to the city, says he was most relieved to learn that new kinds of rodents aren’t still arriving on ships. “There was always a question if we should worry about the ports,” he says. “There may be some arriving, but they’re not able to fight their way in here and establish a new genetic peg.” Corrigan says that the results of Combs’s study allow the city to better allocate resources. The De Blasio administration dedicated $32 million to reduce rat activity by up to 70 percent in the three most infested areas of the city. But Corrigan says that won’t be enough. “My experience is that we rarely give these local populations a knockout punch,” he says. “We’re really good at getting 70 percent eradication. Everyone feels good because that feels simple. But the population dynamics of this species shows that you've got to get 90 percent education.”



Combs now has a deep understanding of the rat problem in New York City. He and his army of undergraduates walked across the entire island of Manhattan beginning at the northern tip, leaving traps. They collected the dead rats and chopped off a piece of their tails, the most convenient sample for genetic analysis. “It’s a useful piece of tissue,” says Combs. “We also could have taken an organ or a toe.”



Urban fieldwork is not always easy. Combs said that sometimes people would steal traps, but he enjoyed the opportunity to ask for tips about where the best rat collection spots are. “Almost every time you say you’re studying rats to someone in New York City, they have stories for you,” he says.



Now that Combs has figured out that the ancestors of the NYC’s modern rats arrived on a boat at about the same time as Alexander Hamilton, he wants to know why. A combination of rat and human behavior probably comes into play. “Rats are territorial. But that's not necessarily the whole story,” he says. “It also might be that trade doesn’t happen in New York City any more.” He wants to investigate genetic ports in New Jersey and other areas of the country to compare results. Corrigan says he is excited to see the future of the research. “Let me tell you something about the rats on the Upper West Side,” he says. “They would probably have some secrets for us. Because they’re all related, and they go way, way back.”




[ad_2]

Written By Ellen Airhart

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to avoid the mid-movie bathroom break

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Charted: Here's how much your food waste hurts the environment

[ad_1] Our species is pretty good at wasting food. Some we discard at the farm for being undersized or oddly shaped. Others we allow to decay in their shipping containers, thrown away before they even reach shelves. We leave even more foodstuffs wasting away in grocery stores, often by letting it sit there until it reaches its sell-by date. As consumers, we don’t have much control over most of the process that brings our food to the grocery store, but we do have control over how much food we personally waste. Let's face it: We’ve all found liquified lettuce in our veggie drawers. Don't fret. It's arguably impossible to consume 100 percent of the food we buy. But a healthy reminder of the effect food waste has on the environment might help us all to be more conscious of the amount of food we eat—and don't eat. Consumer food waste varies extensively depending on the area. In South and Southeast Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that only around ...
Post a Comment
Read more