The Chatterbox Rats of Manhattan
New York researchers have discovered that city rats are constantly chattering and are trying to decipher their language. This could forever change the relationship between humans and the animals.
By Claus Hecking and Alina Schadwinkel
“There’s one!” Ralph Peterson calls out, pointing at the small yellow dot darting across the screen of his thermal imaging camera. “And another one.” The researcher aims the camera at a bush in Central Park in New York City. Three, four, five small yellow dots with thin tails appear on the monitor this evening: rats.
One of the dots climbs up a tree beneath which a park visitor sits on a bench in the darkness. Only the rat’s body heat tells Peterson it’s there. After dusk falls, people walking through the park in the middle of Manhattan can hardly spot the animals, yet they’re everywhere.
Around three million Norway rats live in New York, authorities estimate, among roughly 8.5 million people. The metropolis is sometimes dubbed “Rat City“. Rats belong here just as much as the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. They hunker down in parks, subway stations, skyscraper elevator shafts, under cars or in offices, and feed on leftover scraps: hot dogs, pizza, popcorn. A parallel society.
Peterson, 32, a researcher at the Basis Research Institute in New York, comes to Central Park to study the rats “in their natural habitat,” as he puts it. He also observes them at Union Square in the southern part of Manhattan or in the Harlem neighborhood. He wants to understand how they communicate with each other, so he listens in on them.
New York City’s rats are remarkably chatty, Peterson and his colleagues have discovered—similarly communicative as the people in the restaurants and cafés around them, and far more talkative than their laboratory conspecifics. “They sometimes chatter almost non-stop,” says Emily Mackevicius, 36, the head of Peterson’s research team. But about what?
Mackevicius and Peterson are working to decode the secret language of these chatterbox rats. If they succeed, it could change the relationship between humans and rats forever.
It’s not just major US cities that are home to millions of rats—in Europe too, in Paris, Amsterdam, or Berlin, these animals populate parks and subway tunnels in many places. They gnaw on food in storage rooms. They leave behind droppings, urine, saliva, and hair. They chew through electrical cables, causing short circuits and sometimes even fires. They can make people sick when germs like salmonella from their droppings end up on food, leading to diarrhea and vomiting. Rats are a scourge. For centuries, city dwellers have been trying to get rid of these creatures.
Feeding ban in Berlin, a “rat czar” in New York
In Berlin, there are an estimated two million Norway rats for just under four million residents. Anyone who spots a rat in the German capital—whether in an apartment, a garden, public spaces, restaurants, or cafés—must report it to the authorities. Since mid-September, the Neukölln district office (one of Berlin’s boroughs) has banned feeding animals at Hermannplatz, a major public square and transit hub, to curb rat populations. Anyone who leaves food scraps or trash on the street can be hit with a fine of up to 25,000 euros.
