This article made me laugh, I can't help but wonder if this is some kind of fake news story to promote a class based agenda. I guess it could be true but it seems very odd that these rats traveled all the way from Europe, made their way into the city from the docks, yet somehow decided to stay put for half a millennia once choosing a Manhattan burrough.
What about that doesn’t make sense to you? Almost all species do that — humans included. Literally: Some families in New York City have been in the same burrough since their ancestor’s arrived from Europe. This can go for anywhere on Earth — a girl I once dated could trace her liniage back hundreds of years, mostly in a small town in Australia for centuries after her ancestor was taken there during British colonization.
>> mostly in a small town in Australia for centuries after her ancestor was taken there during British colonization.
Not that many centuries. Australia was colonized very recently. Go to placed like the middle east or china and families may have been in the same area for thousands of years.
I think you probably find some degree of that in Europe too until quite recently, notwithstanding some famous major wars and territorial shifts...
It's an anecdote, but I was pretty impressed when my uncle recently signed up for one of those ancestry tests, and it correctly pinpointed exactly the region that his grandfather (my great-grandfather) had come from in the late 19th century. I'm certainly no expert in the genetics but it boggles my mind a bit that it's detectable that his recent lineage didn't stray much from that small area of Europe until it went to the States. I share 50% of my ancestry with him, the other 50% is from other parts of Europe, my wife is from another part with its complicated story, and we have kids... After 3 generations I don't think any one particular country should be particularly recognizable (though I'll admit, I may be over-simplifying or misunderstanding how it works). Yet my uncle's DNA test pinpointed a small place in Europe with only a few hundred thousand people, and did so correctly.
Be very careful of those tests. Look at who is running them, often a particular church. Many have questioned their methodology. Not of the testing per se, but in how they selected their sample "representative" populations. They didn't do the science to determine whether a sample person was really representative, beyond some questionnaires. And their sampling was based on a particular world view, one that locked populations down circa 150 years ago into modern national boundaries and ignoring previous migrations.
The article doesn't say anything like that at all. The rat "neighborhoods" do overlap, but not densely (think of the islands of wooded areas in a ski resort). In such a case it's not unreasonable to see speciation. (which is not described in this article, thus implying continued interbreeding.)
You don't need a lot of territory for this to happen. The lice that specialize in humans have split into two distinct species: one for head hair and one for pubic hair. (and allegedly the latter is under threat).
Human lice haven't split into two distinct species; the "human" lice - the ones that have been with us for as long as we've been around - are now head lice, and we picked up pubic lice from gorillas after we "lost" most of our body hair. (It's still there, of course, but not in a way that's useful to lice.)
Thank you, I had it mostly wrong. A quick whip through the Wikipedia claims that the pubic louse is indeed a descendent of a gorilla louse, though now utterly speciated from it and human-exclusive.
Human head and body lice have indeed diverged, but are not completely speciated and can, in the lab, still interbreed. The term in the Wikipedia was "subspecies"; as I'm not a zoologist I'm not sure if it's a formal term or not.
But my claim head/pubis claim was wrong. That's my TIL for today!
You're confusing "stay put" with "found a niche and a perpetual and abundant source of food". Many urban species have adapted to city living: Raccoons, skunks, pigeons and sparrows have all found their home and thrive on urban conditions where food is everywhere.
A rat living in the city has it pretty good compared to those that have to forage in the wild. Slices of pizza regularly fall onto the subway tracks, for example, but this really doesn't happen in the middle of the forest. Nobody leaves huge dumpsters full of food scattered across the countryside, but they're literally on every single street corner in a city like New York.
Hmm from the response to my comment I did not articulate my point very well, I will try again, yes everything this article says is true but what is the point? Is it that DNA testing has become so accurate that it can now identify family blood lines? OK so yeah I'm genitically distinct from my neighbors, cousins, siblings....but who cares? Just because you can tell that a rat has a different set of genes than its brothers doesn't make a news story, unless you have a different adjenda in dividing a comunity, check out citylab dot Com with "politics" and then maybe you will get my original point.
> Rats, although abundant, are not easily fooled into traps. They’re wary of new objects. To entice them, the bait was a potent combination of peanut butter, bacon, and oats.
Unless they plant to study them alive or release them when done (ha!) they could have just shot them. It would have been a far better use of everyone's time (and the money of whoever paid for the research) and allowed a more accurate sample of the rat populations as opposed to a sample of the rats that like bacon and don't hate new objects quite so much (the difference in samples is probably negligible but it's still something that must be accounted for).
I don't think the police would appreciate it if you started firing off guns in the middle of the city. It would be a far better use of everyone's time and money to just set traps. Are you thinking people would pitch tents and wait for rats to show up so they could shoot them? That seems harder than setting traps and checking in a day later.
>I don't think the police would appreciate it if you started firing off guns in the middle of the city.
We're talking on the order of a hammer on steel here.
I was under the impression. trapping was happening indoors. Go somewhere you know there will be rats, pop a few, toss them in a bucket, wash rinse repeat. Depending on who the research is being done under it would only take a call to whatever department (probably something having to do with trash) you want the undergrads to tag along with for a shift to collect rats.
>That seems harder than setting traps and checking in a day later.
Going to where you know rats will be once to shoot them is easier than going twice to set and retrieve traps.
Rats aren't just sitting around waiting to be shot. They're very cautious and often hard to spot.
Where you can see them scurrying about there's often lots of people and other distractions, equipment or other obstacles that would make shooting them impractical.
I don't think the NYC subway crew would take too kindly to people shooting up their equipment to get rats.
Sitting around and waiting for rats to show up sounds like more of a waste of time. I can point you to several locations in my neighborhood where I know rats live because I see the tell tale signs, but 99% of the time I actually don't see a live rat scurrying about openly.
Before considering rats, this research group started by looking at white-footed mice. [1]
> The mice have become so genetically distinct from one another that if you show Munshi-South a DNA sequence randomly selected from a white-footed mouse in NYC, he can tell you where it lives. At the same time, city mice as a whole also seem to be evolving new traits that mice from rural areas outside the city lack…
Both articles also discuss other species, but it seems like the focus is usually on genetic differences between urban and rural populations, or polluted versus not polluted, and not on intra-urban genetic variations.
Your quote stopped right where I started to get interested, so for the benefit of others:
> At the same time, city mice as a whole also seem to be evolving new traits that mice from rural areas outside the city lack: genetic mutations that may help them neutralize toxic metals in polluted soil, for example, or speed up their sperm in response to the intense sexual competition in their overcrowded metropolitan homes.
I wonder why they seem to be a little hedgy around the toxic-metal-mutation bit. I'm guessing they suspect that that's what the mutation does, but don't particularly want to feed the poor mice toxic-metal laden soil just to confirm.
Some populations of city mice are ridiculously hardy. They can eat warfarin-laced poison food like it's candy.
It's like the roaches in some Washington D.C. buildings that are immune to virtually every chemical used for pest control. It's so bad that chemical companies test new compounds on those populations first. That's what decades of selective breeding has brought about.
It wouldn't surprise me. I recall watching a video about researchers trapping and tagging raccoons to study their movements. What they found is that the territories of individual urban raccoons were rather small, and bordered by hazards like busy roads. So, if a busy road is sufficiently dangerous to be an individual's boundary, I'd not be surprised if things like highways through the city made for boarders for larger groups and populations of raccoons.
I know there was a study on possums where those on an isolated coastal island were different from their mainland cousins. besides the isolation the mainland ones suffered genetic issues they attributed to environment stress.
A few weeks ago there was a post about Crowded Cities, a startup trying to train crows to pick up and throw away cigarette butts in the city for a food reward. I'm sure it'd be harder, but could crows also be incentivized to somehow pick up rats?
Quick googling suggests a rat is roughly half the weight of a crow - so I imagine it would be somewhat difficult for the crow to pick up anything other than baby rats.
Pizza Rat is mentioned in the first paragraph, with a link to a Buzzfeed article on it.
"New York City is a place where rats climb out of toilets, bite babies in their cribs, crawl on sleeping commuters, take over a Taco Bell restaurant, and drag an entire slice of pizza down the subway stairs."
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadNot that many centuries. Australia was colonized very recently. Go to placed like the middle east or china and families may have been in the same area for thousands of years.
It's an anecdote, but I was pretty impressed when my uncle recently signed up for one of those ancestry tests, and it correctly pinpointed exactly the region that his grandfather (my great-grandfather) had come from in the late 19th century. I'm certainly no expert in the genetics but it boggles my mind a bit that it's detectable that his recent lineage didn't stray much from that small area of Europe until it went to the States. I share 50% of my ancestry with him, the other 50% is from other parts of Europe, my wife is from another part with its complicated story, and we have kids... After 3 generations I don't think any one particular country should be particularly recognizable (though I'll admit, I may be over-simplifying or misunderstanding how it works). Yet my uncle's DNA test pinpointed a small place in Europe with only a few hundred thousand people, and did so correctly.
I am really pleased by the human borough/rat burrow parallel here.
You don't need a lot of territory for this to happen. The lice that specialize in humans have split into two distinct species: one for head hair and one for pubic hair. (and allegedly the latter is under threat).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_louse
Can we, uhh, not mention this to any alien species we may encounter in the future?
Human head and body lice have indeed diverged, but are not completely speciated and can, in the lab, still interbreed. The term in the Wikipedia was "subspecies"; as I'm not a zoologist I'm not sure if it's a formal term or not.
But my claim head/pubis claim was wrong. That's my TIL for today!
Can we get an endangered-species designation asap? I've shorted Gillet's stock.
They were just carried there. They are rather smart, but either way will do what they can to find food and mates, just like every other species.
A rat living in the city has it pretty good compared to those that have to forage in the wild. Slices of pizza regularly fall onto the subway tracks, for example, but this really doesn't happen in the middle of the forest. Nobody leaves huge dumpsters full of food scattered across the countryside, but they're literally on every single street corner in a city like New York.
I doubt The Atlantic would have given citylab permission to republish it like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They pulled out the big guns. Bacon!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat-shot
We're talking on the order of a hammer on steel here.
I was under the impression. trapping was happening indoors. Go somewhere you know there will be rats, pop a few, toss them in a bucket, wash rinse repeat. Depending on who the research is being done under it would only take a call to whatever department (probably something having to do with trash) you want the undergrads to tag along with for a shift to collect rats.
>That seems harder than setting traps and checking in a day later.
Going to where you know rats will be once to shoot them is easier than going twice to set and retrieve traps.
Where you can see them scurrying about there's often lots of people and other distractions, equipment or other obstacles that would make shooting them impractical.
I don't think the NYC subway crew would take too kindly to people shooting up their equipment to get rats.
Many people are opposed to killing lifeforms capable of emotions - especially when there are no valid reason, like food.
> The mice have become so genetically distinct from one another that if you show Munshi-South a DNA sequence randomly selected from a white-footed mouse in NYC, he can tell you where it lives. At the same time, city mice as a whole also seem to be evolving new traits that mice from rural areas outside the city lack…
[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/uptown-mice-are...
This is an older article, from when their first studies were coming out.
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26evolve.html
Both articles also discuss other species, but it seems like the focus is usually on genetic differences between urban and rural populations, or polluted versus not polluted, and not on intra-urban genetic variations.
> At the same time, city mice as a whole also seem to be evolving new traits that mice from rural areas outside the city lack: genetic mutations that may help them neutralize toxic metals in polluted soil, for example, or speed up their sperm in response to the intense sexual competition in their overcrowded metropolitan homes.
I wonder why they seem to be a little hedgy around the toxic-metal-mutation bit. I'm guessing they suspect that that's what the mutation does, but don't particularly want to feed the poor mice toxic-metal laden soil just to confirm.
It's like the roaches in some Washington D.C. buildings that are immune to virtually every chemical used for pest control. It's so bad that chemical companies test new compounds on those populations first. That's what decades of selective breeding has brought about.
question : where does such food come from, and why?
Respectfully, I think it's more likely that definite results are hard to get. Researchers generally don't shy away from harming mice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raccoon#Distribution_in_Germ...
my googlefu fails me currently
http://www.crowdedcities.com/
Or the Avocado Rat - Pizza Rat's hip cousin living in Williamsburg?
"New York City is a place where rats climb out of toilets, bite babies in their cribs, crawl on sleeping commuters, take over a Taco Bell restaurant, and drag an entire slice of pizza down the subway stairs."