Short Wave - Are Rats Running This Podcast?

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

This week, New York City crowned Kathleen Corradi its first rat czar. The new position is part of a multipronged approach from city officials. Reporter and New Yorker Anil Oza called up rodentologists to understand — does their approach withstand the test of scientific research? We love hearing your musings and questions about the science in your everyday life. Reach us by emailing [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

So step one, know your enemy. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, today we have a treat for you, reporter and forever shortwaiver, and Neil Oza is here today to bring us some news from NYC. Hi, Gina. I do have a story for you about some really, really bad neighbors here, near. Oh, no. So bad, actually, that our mayor, Eric Adams has taken notice. We're making clear that rats don't run our city. New Yorkers do. Rats.

Okay, I'm so excited about this. It's going to be like Ghostbusters, but for rats. Yeah, kind of. Rats have been all over the place in New York City, literally in their image. There's posters everywhere advertising a new policy of putting out garbage later in the day. And this week, Mayor Adams appointed a Ratsar, Kathleen Karate. Okay, a Ratsar? Hasn't New York always had rats?

What would a Ratsar's job even be? Yeah, we've always had rats. rats. But in theory, this person's job would be to get rid of the rats in New York City and to get their population under control. So I've been making a lot of calls to understand the extent of the problem to how we got to such a hard anti-rat stance here in the city. And one of those people was Michael Parsons, an urban rodentologist at Fordham University here in the city. And Michael actually has this five-step process for limiting the number of rats. And the first step was the one that really stuck with me. So step one, know your enemy. And that really is about understanding the

biology of rats. Okay. I mean, I struggle with understanding biology in general, but how do other scientists understand our ratty enemies? Well, actually, they feel just as close as you do, Gina. And it turns out that question is a lot easier asked than answered. Take Kaylee Byers. She's a senior scientist at the Pacific Institute on Pathogens, Pandemics, and Society at Simon Fraser University. We don't really have a good sense of the rat situation anywhere, to be honest. I mean, we know lab rats, Right, but that's not the same as studying wild rats. What do their relationships look like when they're underground? And I think part of the reason it's hard to gather that information is because they are really elusive.

So today on the show, infiltrating the secret life of urban rats. We talk to some of the biggest figures in urban rodentology to figure out is all that we know about them enough to stop them. I hope so. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm in El Oza. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Okay, so, Anil, we know step one of Michael Parsons' plan for rats, know your enemy, and then Kaylee Byers reveals how unknown they are. So in light of those two things, what's New York's plan for tackling these elusive critters?

So it's the two main things that we talked about earlier. For one, there's a new rule where people have to put out their garbage much later in the day than they used to. And they're also hiring a rat czar to, quote, fight the real enemy, New York City's rat population. But let's focus on that first one for a minute. because it cannot be understated how important garbage is to rats. I thought that Michael put this connection really, really well. There's a rat equation, very simple math. Garbage in in equals rats out.

So in New York, we tend to work on rats out. And that means we're finding ways to kill, kill, kill, hate, hate, vitriol, kill. Okay. I mean, I like the math. It makes sense. But what does he think about moving the garbage timing? Is it going to make any difference? Actually, he doesn't think it will.

and it comes down to our understanding of rats. So New York, along with all the places we're going to talk about today, have two main kinds of rats. There's brown rats, which is the ones that you see scurrying along the street a lot, then black rats, which are sometimes called the roof rats, because they're on the roofs of buildings and stuff like that. But both of these species are nocturnal, which means that... You can move it around all you want to. You can put it in the trunk of your car. You can drive it around.

You can take it with your grocery shopping. The majority of rats don't care because, you see, they're asleep. So preventing garbage from being accessible for a couple extra hours may not really do much. They're waiting for the picnic to happen in the evenings. Then what should we be doing about the garbage? Yeah, so all of the experts I talked to, including Michael, so that when people or city officials talk about rat management, it's usually all about getting rid of the rats.

They usually said that rats are a symptom of other problems in the city. But Kaylee told me, based on our work with the Vancouver Rat Project, we need to focus on the problems that are causing rat over. population in the first place. We need to not just be thinking about how do we eradicate rats, right? We've been doing that for thousands of years. Catch, kill, repeat. And it's not working.

And so instead, having someone to think about how do rats intersect with other aspects of urban planning in the city, waste management, green spaces, transit, housing? Okay, so it's not just like putting your garbage out, but it's like littering and housing and making sure public transportation is clean. Yeah, totally. I can't tell you how many times I've seen rats on subway stations eating garbage. So it's about keeping those spaces cleaner, making sure that garbage is being taken out, making sure that housing isn't conducive to rats living in your floors or anything like that. But Kaylee and Michael both told me that part of this is figuring out specific answers to questions of what we should be doing. And it's sort of what makes the research really groundbreaking is that we really haven't done a ton of studies on urban rats. But it also shows that for decades, we've sort of ignored this tension between rodents and humans. I'm curious, like, what exactly do we need to know about rats to better manage our infestation problem?

Yeah, so the main thing that Kaylee mentioned was understanding rats' behaviors. She says that some of the studies that she's doing have had sort of confusing results. In some studies where they remove rats from this bigger population, they end up increasing the amount of disease that's in a population. And other times, it decreases. And understanding why certain measures have that result sort of has to do with what these rats are doing in sewer. and behind these little nooks and crannies that we don't get to see,

which is why Kaylee told me she really wants one thing. Rat cam. Like if someone would just give me all the money, I would set up camera traps and things underground in borough system so you could actually watch how urban rats interact with each other. Because those interactions are really important to understanding how diseases are transmitted among rats and what those risks then look like for people.

But another thing is understanding the nuances of rats, because there's a lot of different rat populations in a single city. Okay, this is starting to remind me of that opening scene of Ratatouille, where you realize that rats are like everywhere in Paris. Exactly. And there's different kinds of rats. You have Remy who loves to be in the city eating from restaurants, and then you have his brother who loves just eating the garbage. But just like that, New York City has a bunch of different kind of rats. And there was no one better to explain those nuances than Bobby Corgan. As I was talking to researchers of his story, they all mentioned him by name telling me you've got to talk to Bobby. He's one of the preeminent experts on urban rats. And he's done research for many years and he's worked in pest management here in New York City.

And he says those nuances are found in the rats' many, many wide-ranging homes. We have these rats that occupy all the spaces. They occupy ceilings in some of the most modern skyscrapers. in any city around the world, they're all the way down into the sub-sub basements of our 1800s buildings. So if we leave 30 old sewer laterals below an old building in an alleyway, say, in any city, Paris and New York or San Francisco, we now build a city for rats. Because you can't fix the problem if you don't know where it is. But we're not measuring any of that. So we don't have any idea when, let's say, someone

initiates a campaign to control the rats of a neighborhood. Well, what does that mean? What are we controlling? The surface rats? And if we only control the surface rats, what about the subsurface rats? What about park rats? So forth and so on. And so we have all these different rats.

But even if the New York City government did finally greenlight research and do their due diligence of learning about where all of these different rat populations are, there's one more hitch here. Oh, no. Okay. What's the hitch? So as I was talking to all these scientists that work with urban rats, they all had stories about how they were outsparted, tricked, and bamboozled by these rats. We caught this roof rat. She was just like this beautiful, calm rat. And I put my hand into wrangle the rat. She just kind of slowly crawled into my hand

and then immediately escaped out of the corner of the trap and ran off into the bushes. I'm like, oh, you had a system. You knew what was up. There are times where they're managing to outsmart entire rat management strategies. There's this really ambitious program in New Zealand, actually, called Predator Free 2050, where they're trying to get rid of a bunch of different invasive animals, possums, stoats, ferrets, weasels. But the one that's proven the hardest is the rats. Rats are a global pest. They are pests because they are just so good at doing what they do. That's Dan Tompkins. He's a science director of Predator Free 2050.

And he says that Wellington, the city where they're trialling a bunch of these different methods to get rid of these animals, they got really close to getting rid of all of their rats. But we've got a few individual shit rats just hanging on. For the life of us, we couldn't work out why it wasn't working. We were trying every different approach to get rid of these last individuals. And what we've discovered for the first time is that actually there's some of these rats never ever touched the ground in their entire life. If you're not putting things up in the tree canopy, you're never going to get rid of them. Okay. Speaking of getting rid of them, has this news? New Zealand project fared any better with the rats than New York.

So it's really hard to tell so early into this program, but they've had some success. So when Dan talked about managing rats in these huge urban neighborhoods or throughout the country, it was a big collective thing that people were doing in their backyard or with their communities. But here in New York, it's really an individual thing. Yeah, the hire the rats are to hunt down and murder all the rats. Yeah. And some of the scientists I talked to had question marks about this rat czar. And it may be the wrong way to be thinking about this problem.

because it places all of the responsibility on this one person to be thinking about these rats and chasing after them. When really what we need is everyone to be involved in it in their own neighborhoods and managing their garbage. So that's something that dances that New Zealand has done really, really well. We're trying nationwide eradication. And so we quickly realize that to get this job done, you've got to have the engaged support of communities. A sense of ownership. And that means that they're in for the long haul. and they take setbacks and things not working

and they keep going until they get it right. Because one person, a single rats are, can't be in all the ceilings and basements and pipes and public spaces in New York City all at once and every day. Every individual in the community is really, really important, especially when you're battling another animal that's so elusive and so smart, and that reproduces so quickly. And I did reach out to the mayor's office to see if I could talk to this

all-important rats are, and she didn't have time to talk to us. but they did say that they hope that Kathleen and Karate will be able to work with agencies across the city. I also emailed Michael, the rodentologist from Fordham, about their new hire, and he said that he's concerned that the pick isn't a rodentologist, but he wants to give her a chance before she's properly started. It's not sounding like New York's current action plan is effective. But maybe I'm wrong, but do you think we can actually fix the urban rep problem in New York? I hate to say that it's really hard to say if we know whether this will work or not,

but it definitely won't be easy. When I was talking to Bobby, who's a pioneer of this field, he thinks that making a big impact on these urban rat populations will take a serious pivot and shift in this current thinking. Specifically, he thinks that we have to stop underestimating rats. He was even telling me about times that he's seen rats set off traps with sticks so they could run around and get a bunch of food. So instead of relying just on the usual traps, sprays, poisons, or other things, we'd be doing everything that we can to rat-proof the city. And does he think we can collectively shift our thinking like that? I think he hoped so. The one thing that he told me that he wanted our listeners to know was that if you see a rat in your neighborhood, there's probably a reason why.

And if it's not you, it's your neighbor. And so you sort of have to make sure that you're all in this together. But I did ask him, if it ever weighs on him that after all this research, all his efforts to get rid of these urban rats, does it weigh on him that they may get the better of us? And this is what he had to say. It doesn't weigh on me. If you're a rat or a rodent or a mouse or something and say, look, we're doing what you're trying to do. We're trying to increase our species as fast as we can. That's what every mammal is trying to do.

So I'm not bothered by it. I'm like, okay, we'll just keep working at this as best as we can. He, like, loves them a little bit, I think. I know. I think he just respects what they're trying to do. One thing that we didn't actually talk about is that he actually lived with their heads for a little while to better understand them. So I think there's a little bit of a connection there. Oh, well, thank you.

Anil for bringing us this rat story. I've learned a lot. I am never going to underestimate a rat, ever again. Well, I hope the next time you see a rat, you think of me. Thank you so much, Gina. I will. Thank you, Anil. This episode was produced by Liz Metzker, edited by our managing producer Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Brittany Anson. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Anya Grenman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks, as always, for listening to Shortwave. from NPR.