{"id":224073,"date":"2025-09-13T17:14:28","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T17:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/224073\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T17:14:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T17:14:28","slug":"scientists-map-nightlife-and-communication-of-nyc-rats-to-help-urban-planning-and-pest-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/224073\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Map Nightlife and Communication of NYC Rats to Help Urban Planning and Pest Control"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here in New York City, we humans crown ourselves rulers of the five boroughs\u2014but the kingdom is split. We cohabit with a parallel society that commutes along subway rails, picnics in parks and patronizes trash cans like they\u2019re Restaurant Row. A new field study<\/a> watched them the way New Yorkers often watch each other: from a respectful distance and with digital tech. The findings shed light on how rats have adapted to city life<\/a>\u2014and how chatty they are. \u201cThere\u2019s this kind of secret language that rats are communicating in with each other that we don\u2019t hear,\u201d says Emily Mackevicius, a neuroscientist and a co-author of the study. \u201cThey\u2019re very social,\u201d adds Ralph Peterson, another study co-author. \u201cThey\u2019re rugged, and they\u2019re New Yorkers themselves: persistent and resilient and able to thrive in a very extreme environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

At three Manhattan locations\u2014a park, a subway platform and a sidewalk\u2014the team used a specialized wireless recorder to eavesdrop on the rats\u2019 ultrasonic conversations<\/a>, which humans can\u2019t hear. They placed thermal cameras<\/a> on tripods or held them by hand to record the warm bodies moving like glowing, otherworldly specters along the cooler ground. Dmitry Batenkov, a team member who works with machine learning and computational modeling, then converted the two-dimensional videos into three dimensions because 2D recordings distort the size and movement of animals, making rats closer to the camera appear larger.<\/p>\n

A thermal video of rats in Manhattan, N.Y.<\/p>\n

On supporting science journalism<\/p>\n

If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing<\/a>. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n

New York City is home to an estimated three million rats\u2014approximately one for every three humans. Virtually all of these are Rattus norvegicus\u2014the brown rat, aka the Norway rat\u2014a larger and more robust species than the black rat (Rattus rattus), which arrived first on ships<\/a> in the 1600s but was displaced by the brown rat in the 1700s. Since then about 500 generations of brown rats have lived here and have developed unique genetic adaptations<\/a> related to metabolism, diet, nervous system and locomotion. Even the shape of their heads has changed. And to survive, they need a single daily ounce of water and food, the latter of which we provide in abundance, often processed.<\/p>\n

Over this past summer in New York City, the research team\u2014Mackevicius, Peterson, Batenkov and Ahmed El Hady, a neuroscientist who has studied rats and collective behavior\u2014came together with a simple yet powerful idea: take what is known about rats from lab research and see how it holds up in the places we share with them. They wanted to do so not just to understand the animals\u2019 behavior and cognition in the urban wild but also so that city planners, building managers and public\u2011health teams could craft decisions with real data to make city life a little less\u2014squeaky. If scientists can more precisely measure rats\u2019 complex habits and predilections, they can apply those data to trash pickup timing, building design, disease risk<\/a> near burrows and even the question of which blocks attract big, bold rats versus skittish juveniles. Peterson, a computational neuroscientist, sums the concept up succinctly. \u201cIt\u2019s like Sun Tzu says in The Art of War: to defeat your enemy, you have to understand your enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

“To defeat your enemy, you have to understand your enemy.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 1944 Joseph Mitchell, the legendary New Yorker writer who chronicled the city\u2019s overlooked characters, wrote about the metropolis\u2019s shadow mascot: \u201cAnyone who has been confronted by a rat in the bleakness of a Manhattan dawn and has seen it whirl and slink away, its claws rasping against the pavement, thereafter understands fully why this beast has been for centuries a symbol of the Judas and the stool pigeon, of soullessness in general.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A mural of a rat wearing an \u201cI Love New York\u201d T-shirt on a wall on the corner of Wooster Street and Grand Street in New York City.<\/p>\n

Wesley Johnson\/PA Images\/Alamy<\/p>\n

But maybe Mitchell was wrong about the soulless part. Rats are the dolphins of the sewage system; they chatter constantly as they run along the sidewalk in packs, peeking from holes, scavenging beneath grates or slipping into human-audible squeaks during scuffles by the dumpsters. One of the rats that the team recorded even soliloquized alone inside a garbage bag\u2014perhaps offering a Yelp review for passing comrades.<\/p>\n

\n

Rats are the dolphins of the sewage system.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The study, which was released as a preprint paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed, also revealed that the rats modulated their ultrasonic squeaking<\/a> based on ambient sound. In the subway system, which was louder than parks and sidewalks, rats communicated more loudly. But the moment that truly surprised Mackevicius was in the street. \u201cThere was an ambulance going by, and you could look at that in the spectrogram, and the rat vocalizations<\/a> were louder than the ambulance,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re just kind of screaming to each other, but we just don\u2019t hear it.\u201d Peterson, who has studied rodent vocalizations in the lab, was struck by how talkative the vermin were. \u201cWhy would you vocalize if not to some end?\u201d he asks. \u201cThe fact that we don\u2019t understand that yet\u2014this is one of the questions that really keeps me up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A rat searches for food on a subway platform as commuters look on at the Columbus Circle-59th Street station in Manhattan, NY.<\/p>\n

Gary Hershorn\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

The study also suggested that the city rats\u2019 size and behavior were linked. Younger rats were more likely to venture out together; the team saw groups of up to 20. \u201cThe smaller ones are likely juvenile rats, so they\u2019re kind of learning how to forage, and they tend to move a bit more slowly and a bit less in coordination, with bursts of movement,\u201d Mackevicius says. But sometimes the researchers also saw lone rats. \u201cThese are big, honking, huge rats,\u201d Peterson says. \u201cThis seems like some sort of role that this single rat has, to go out into the environment and assay its surroundings and bring food back or relay information back to the rest of the colony. It had me asking a lot of questions about social hierarchy and delegation of roles and tasks.\u201d Mitchell\u2019s 1944 article said exterminators called old rats \u201cMoby Dicks,\u201d a reference to the giant white whale in Herman Melville\u2019s classic novel. \u201cRats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth,\u201d Mitchell quoted an exterminator as saying\u2014which matches Peterson\u2019s observation about the big, solo scavengers: \u201cThey kind of know what they\u2019re doing out there,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cRats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In Mitchell\u2019s article, one New York exterminator argued that buildings had to be rat-proofed, that killing rodents was a waste of time. \u201cIt\u2019s like taking aspirin for a cancer,\u201d he said. Some contemporary research concurs, noting that poison can endanger pets<\/a> and the ecosystem<\/a> and that rats reproduce too quickly for poisoning to work. They become sexually mature in just two to three months, with females going into heat every few days and able to conceive within a day after giving birth. Pregnancies last only about three weeks, producing litters of six to 12 pups\u2014and sometimes up to 20. Under ideal conditions, a single pair could theoretically generate thousands of descendants in a year, though survival rates keep numbers much lower.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you need to do is create environments that they don\u2019t like,\u201d Mackevicius says. At a city rat-mitigation-training event for community gardens, she learned that rats avoid open space\u2014a tendency confirmed by lab experiments. For instance, community gardeners<\/a> in New York City often remove clutter<\/a> to make use of this aversion. Similarly, trash cans tucked into an alley might look like a romantic dinner for two in a dim alcove, but the same cans in an open space could feel like a picnic on the Cross Bronx Expressway. This acute awareness that rats have of open and protected spaces was the other reason that Batenkov converted the 2D videos into 3D: to precisely measure the rats\u2019 behaviors in relationship to their settings. This data could someday even be used to generate rat\u2019s\u2011eye simulations<\/a> to show exactly how they navigate the city<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cRat-mitigation strategies have been the same for a long time, but the rat numbers are rising,\u201d Peterson says. \u201cI don\u2019t think putting a box with a little piece of cheese in it is going to do anything…. People underestimate how smart the species is.\u201d He believes we should at least consider more futuristic solutions, even if they might sound zany. For instance, research on gerbils\u2014another highly social rodent\u2014has shown that they will respond to recorded gerbil vocalizations played on speakers. \u201cWe can build little robotic systems that sense [rat] movement and shine light at them or sense their movement and play certain vocalizations back at them,\u201d he suggests, \u201cand do this in a very dynamic way that addresses this issue of how to mitigate a smart species.\u201d At very least, the city could use the team\u2019s surveillance system to create a low-cost network that detects rat hot spots and infestation spikes\u2014a real-time rodent weather report that would allow city officials to target their responses. This humane, data-driven pest control would be safer for people, pets, and the ecosystem and could even be generalized to deal with other urban cotenants, from raccoons to stray dogs.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) exiting a drain pipe.<\/p>\n

Scott Linstead\/Science Source<\/p>\n

The study left the team with tantalizing questions: What are rats really saying? How smart are they? What are their burrows like? Peterson recalls watching a battle-scarred rat on the subway tracks as a train came through. \u201cThe train left… and we saw the rat flopped over in a seemingly dead posture. It must have been a minute. Then it popped back up and started running away. It\u2019s perhaps evidence of a rat playing dead in the wild, which we know that other species do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mackevicius had previously been studying birds in central park, and when she started on rats, she was surprised by how friends reacted. \u201cMore people asked to go out on fieldwork with me for rats than for birds,\u201d she says. Many passing New Yorkers also approached the researchers as they worked, asking what they were doing and getting excited upon learning they were studying rats. \u201cThen they would offer their own personal rat story,\u201d Peterson recalls. \u201c\u2018Oh, if you want to see rats<\/a>, come to this place. I see them. They\u2019re as big as cats. They do this. They do that. They chew through steel.\u2019 There\u2019s this kind of childlike intrigue that everyone in the city has, which feels interesting, especially in a very divisive time. It\u2019s like rats<\/a> are bringing people together.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here in New York City, we humans crown ourselves rulers of the five boroughs\u2014but the kingdom is split.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":224074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-224073","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115198117007654849","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}