In recent weeks, the Montreal rats have been talking. According to some people, the city is crawling with rodents, and it will be necessary to strike hard to prevent the rats from running in the next municipal elections.
The opening of the sewers during the works, waste management problems and the poor quality of the poisons used to control them would be aggravating factors. There would be more rats than Montrealers. The Anglos and the Francos may therefore dispute it, the city belongs more to rats, squirrels, raccoons, pigeons and gulls.
These species are wonderfully adapted to human presence. They understood that to survive the omnipotent Sapiens, it was better to approach it: our mountains of waste represent for them mountains of resources.
Raccoons are so well adapted to city life that they teach evening classes at the park. They share with the skunks their new finds to open the compost bins.
Trained by raccoons, squirrels have also learned to tear open garbage bags and scatter their contents on the sidewalks (this is the famous dissection course). They have also learned from the gulls the art of harassing picnickers to steal food. In short, squirrels have gone from nutcrackers to balls crackers. But, unlike rats, they are found to be very cute, which facilitates their urban acceptability.
Moreover, a friend said that it is very easy to recognize the new French arrivals on the Plateau-Mont-Royal: they are the only ones who find the squirrels of La Fontaine Park still exotic enough to take a picture of them. If we don’t find a way to control them, I bet you that in a few years, the squirrels of Montreal will buy food by stealing money directly from taxpayers’ pockets. They will then be in competition with the civil servants of the ministry of Revenue who will not hesitate to make their skin.
Let’s go back to the undesirable rodent that is the sewer rat. Rat populations can certainly be reduced, but eliminating them is impossible. They are stronger and more resilient than us. The gray rat is also called brown rat or sewer rat. But, for us biologists, there will always be Rattus norvegicus. Norvegicus as in Norway, you read that right! It is associated with Norway, but the territory of origin of its ancestors is rather Siberia, northeastern China and Japan. Why did you name it Norway rat? By mistake. The British physician and naturalist John Berkenhout who gave it this name came across it in 1769 in the port of Edinburgh, Scotland. Since the traveler rat was descended from a Danish ship which had just arrived from Norway, the naturalist was confused.
Long before the globalization of cultures, the Norway rat clung to humans to spread across the planet. Wherever he lands, he ends up adapting and taking his ease.
Unfortunately, these rodents are also vectors of diseases, such as typhus and rabies, and they soil our food with their urine and excrement. Moreover, we have long criticized rattus rattus (the black rat) of being responsible for the bubonic plague epidemic that decimated much of Europe in the Middle Ages. But today, scientists seem to partially exonerate this rat from the Middle East and which some believe took advantage of the Crusades to immigrate to Europe.
My late and brilliant friend and collaborator of the show Nature according to Boucar Harold Lévé, owner of Entreprises Maheu and pest management specialist, knew more than anyone about the extraordinary world of rats. He told me that with his very poor vision, the rat orients itself at night using its whiskers called whiskers. Ultrasounds and odors are at the center of the mode of communication of these animals whose paranoia is a mode of survival.
Placed in front of a new food resource, the rats will show great caution before touching it. If a tester shows signs of postprandial distress (after feeding), the rest of the colony will move away from the deadly chow forever. According to Harold, soft concrete, wood, rubber, and even aluminum foil can enter their bellies without fatally twisting their guts. When you have teeth that grow continuously, you have to gnaw on tough things to wear them down.
Should we slow down the rodents or be chomping at the bit? Remember that without rats in our cities, our sewers would be constantly clogged, say scientists. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), in Paris alone, rats consume about 800 tons of garbage per day. Even if we like to hate them, we still have to thank them for this work, but also for having given their bodies to our science and allowed a spectacular leap in medicine. We should also remember that the rat is a social, intelligent, traveling, opportunistic, gregarious, prolific, omnivorous animal that lives in hierarchical groups and has a great capacity for adaptation. Doesn’t that remind you of another species, a large biped that abounds on the island of Montreal? Two charges of the same sign repel each other. It is this principle enshrined in Coulomb’s law, well known to all those who have done a little physics. While Sapiens rages, the rat expands its spleen.