Rats are even more dependent on humans than usual during the long winter months.
How do the severe frosts affect Helsinki's abundant rat population?
Aamulehti published in Tampere wrote due to the effect of severe frosts on the rat population. As in Helsinki, rat sightings have also increased in Tampere. In both cities, the construction of tramways and other things is thought to have spurred the rats into motion.
In the Aamulehti story, the health protection inspector Matti Naukkarinen The city of Tampere predicted that at its peak the rat population could drop by up to 90 percent thanks to the freezing temperatures.
90 percent of the white-tailed deer die in the Finnish winter. You don't really see falcons, because the birds are tasty even when cold. Instead of the fact that the ongoing period of severe frost would thin out the rat population to the same extent, the evolutionary biologist Tuomas Aivelo considered “wishful thinking”.
“We don't know how much rats will decrease. Certainly the frost period has an effect, but 90 percent sounds like wishful thinking,” says Aivelo.
Aivelo states, like Naukkarinen, that a lot depends on how much a person offers the rats to eat. The length of winter affects the rat population more than severe frosts:
Tuomas Aivelo
“Unlike voles, mice and moles, rats, being larger than rodents, can't really move in the snow. This affects the rats' food intake. They don't get natural food in the winter, when there is no non-human food.”
Frost giving the rats extra work when the food scraps in the waste canopies might freeze. On the other hand, the original home of rats is in the averagely cool regions of Northern China and Mongolia, where the cold is no stranger.
The rat was there before the man. The survival of the species shows that in terms of evolutionary biology, the animal can withstand long cold periods quite well. However, the most important benefactor is a person:
Rats are social animals that store food. “It was discovered that the rat had taken a couple of kilos from the bird board between the wall.”
Videos show rat sightings in Helsinki:
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