Brown rats are said to have appeared in large numbers in Dutch cities lately. In any case, people are complaining about this – and measures are being taken. Rat traps with peanut butter were placed on the Lijnbaan in Rotterdam, in The Hague the municipality was there last year the 'Stop the rat' campaign started, and new ones were closed properly on Museumplein in Amsterdam in December rat-unfriendly garbage containers installed. Because we know that rats are attracted to thrown away food.
But beyond that we know little about city rats: not how and where they live in the city, or exactly how many there are. Previous attempts to map this out nationally had little success. That is why the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment started a national one in 2019 'Rat Monitor'. This keeps track of where and when a rat was reported in the Netherlands on a map. A report made by “professional pest controllers”, that is. Not every citizen can call and say that he saw a rat, or at least such a report will not appear on the map.
In Finland they have taken a step in that direction. At the University of Helsinki they thought: the city is crawling with rats, people see them everywhere, we don't know nearly enough about rats and their interaction with humans – let's get the city's residents involved. That's how it started in 2018 Helsinki Urban Rat Research Project (HURP), which has already published several studies. As it turned out, for example that rats in the sewers are more often infected with a pathogenic bacteria from human fecesthan that people who have food poisoning bacteria (Campylobacter jejuni) by contact with rat droppings. The urban rat project won a university citizen science prize at the end of last year, partly because the project used high school students as urban rat researchers. That because of that in passing learned something about what doing science entails.
#Sharing #city #rat #knowledge