He consulted with cities on their rats, preaching his most important discovery throughout the countrythat poisoning rats was not in itself an effective way of controlling them. Throughout the 1950s, Davis was America’s rodent control guru. Rats are thought to feel especially safe at corners, when they are simultaneously touching a wall and free to escape. One pair of rats has the potential of 15,000 descendants in a year. One rat’s nest can turn into a rat colony of fifty rats in six months. If there is a healthy amount of garbage for the rats to eat, then a female rat will produce up to twelve litters of twenty rats each a year. And a female rat can become pregnant immediately after giving birth. (Male rats exiled from their nest by more aggressive male rats will also live in all-male rat colonies and have sex with the other male rats.) The gestation period for a pregnant female rat is twenty-one days, the average litter between eight to ten pups.
Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day, and a male rat will have sex with as many female rats as possibleaccording to one report, a dominant male rat may mate with up to twenty female rats in just six hours. With the alligator-like structure of their jaws, rats can exert a biting pressure of up to seven thousand pounds per square inch. In terms of hardness, the brown rat’s teeth are stronger than aluminum, copper, lead, and iron.
It is sometimes erroneously stated that the rat gnaws solely to limit the length of its incisors, which would otherwise grow out of its head, but this is not the case: the incisors wear down naturally. I think of rats as our mirror species, reversed but similar, thriving or suffering in the very cities where we do the same. Rats live in man’s parallel universe, surviving on the effluvia of human society they eat our garbage.
Rats have conquered every continent that humans have conquered, mostly with the humans’ aid, and the not-so-epic-seeming story of rats is close to one version of the epic story of man: when they arrive as immigrants to a newfound land, rats push out the creatures that have preceded them, multiply to such an extent as to stretch resources to the limit, consume their way toward faminea point at which they decline, until, once again, they are forced to fight, wander, or die.
0 kommentar(er)
