Humans are built to last. Rats, not so much. A newly discovered body clock apparently ticks much faster in rats, snuffing out their lives tens of years earlier than humans.

This biological rhythm, which tends to cut short the lives of smaller animals and let big creatures live longer, should apply to all mammals, said researcher Timothy Bromage, a dental professor at New York University.

Bromage discovered the rhythm while looking at growth lines in tooth enamel and skeletal bones in rats, medium-sized monkeys and humans.

Unlike circadian rhythms, which follow a relatively strict 24-hour cycle and coordinate sleep-wake stints, the new biological clock ticks to a different beat depending upon the animal. In general, the clock operates on shorter time intervals for small mammals and longer ones for larger animals. For rats, every day meant a new growth ring, while the monkeys followed a four-day interval and humans showed eight-day patterns.

The same biological rhythm that controls tooth and bone growth also determines body processes, such as heart and respiration rates, Bromage said.

“In fact, the rhythm affects an organism’s overall pace of life, and its life span,” Bromage said. “So, a rat that grows teeth and bone in one-eighth the time of a human also lives faster and dies younger.”

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

Health officials in Thailand have launched a national campaign against rats - starting with their own offices.

In the past two days, nearly 50 rats were caught inside the Health Ministry compound in Bangkok, prompting Friday’s announcement of a national anti-rodent campaign.

The infestation of the ministry responsible for promoting health and hygiene shows just how pervasive Thailand’s rat problem has become, Health Minister Chaiya Sasomsup said in a statement.

“Rats are commonly found wherever there is food, debris and garbage - not just at the Health Ministry,” Chaiya said.

The ministry hopes to reduce the number of rats before Thailand’s rainy season, which typically starts in May, when standing water can become contaminated with the bacterial diseases rats can carry.

{ AP/WTOP | Continue reading }

Pigeons are guilty of transmitting fungal and bacterial diseases, primarily via their droppings, which pose the greatest risk to those with weakened immune systems. But cast against the recent spread of infectious zoonotic diseases—such as H5N1 bird flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)—experts question the degree of concern over the disease-bearing potential of the birds that have colonized cities the world over.

In principle, any animal can carry a disease that humans could catch. But Marm Kilpatrick, an ecologist at the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York City, which studies human-induced environmental change, species health and biodiversity, wrote in an e-mail: “In reality, the vast majority [about 99.999 percent] of pathogens that are carried by animals won’t infect people.”

Even so, zoonotic diseases represent a growing proportion of emerging infectious diseases; two British studies calculated that about 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. (By comparison, about 60 percent of all human pathogens can infect animals.)

Real rats (the ground-hugging kind) aren’t innocent by any means: Research links them with the reemergence of bubonic plague and typhus. But bats (of whom “winged rats” is more apropos) may be giving the unpopular rodents a run for their infamous reputation. Long associated with rabies, bats gained new notoriety in the 1990s after outbreaks of the Hendra and Nipah viruses killed both humans and livestock in Australia and Southeast Asia, respectively. A few years later SARS terrified the world by taking flight on commercial airlines. The virus left a trail leading back to the live animal markets in China, first to civet cats and subsequently to bats, the latter vector now believed to be the true starting point for the virus.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

related { So now we have bird flu in Iran and the virus is marching relentlessly across India }

More than 200 years ago, rats jumped ship for Rat Island.

The muscular Norway rat climbed ashore on the rugged, uninhabited island in far southwestern Alaska in 1780 after a rodent-infested Japanese ship ran aground. It was the first time rats had made it to Alaska.

Since then, Rat Island, as the piece of rock was dubbed by a sea captain in the 1800s, has gone eerily silent. The sounds of birds are missing.

That is because the rats feed on eggs, chicks and adult seabirds, which come to the mostly treeless island to nest on the ground or in crevices in the volcanic rock.

“As far as bird life, it is a dead zone,” said Steve Ebbert, a biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, whose 2,500 mostly uninhabited islands include the Aleutian chain, of which Rat Island is a part.

State and federal wildlife biologists are gearing up for an assault on the rats of still-uninhabited Rat Island, hoping to exterminate them with rat poison dropped from helicopters. If they succeed, the birds will sing again on Rat Island. And it will be the third-largest island in the world to be made rat-free.

The world’s biggest island rat eradication took place on 27,922-acre Campbell Island off New Zealand. Rats also have been wiped out on Canada’s 8,080-acre Langara Island.

Rats have been the scourge of islands worldwide. According to the California-based group Island Conservation, rats are to blame for between 40 percent and 60 percent of all seabirds and reptile extinctions, with 90 percent of those occurring on islands.

{ CNN | Continue reading }

related { Serendipity 3, a restaurant on Manhattan’s East Side, was allowed to reopen Tuesday, about three weeks after it was shuttered because of rodent infestation. }

O.K., I still don’t like rats, and I’ll never forget the sensation of whiskers brushing my ankles when a rat in Central Park scampered over my feet. There are plenty of reasons to fear rats. They carry diseases like typhus, leptospirosis, hanta virus pulmonary syndrome, rat bite fever, salmonella poisoning, and of course bubonic plague. (…) “Over the past century alone,” writes Robert Sullivan in “Rats,” his magisterial history of the urban pest, “rats have been responsible for the death of more than 10 million people.”

Yet our ratly transactions are not all woes and buboes. As the first mammals domesticated strictly for research purposes, scientists say, rats in the laboratory may well have saved at least as many human lives through the years as rats in the alley have taken. Rats are the preferred experimental animal for studies of the heart, kidneys, immune system, reproductive system, nervous system and other body sectors, and recent breakthroughs in manipulating the rat genome may soon allow the rat to displace the mouse as the geneticist’s darling, too. (…)

They’re surprisingly self-aware. They laugh when tickled, especially when they’re young, and they have ticklish spots; tickle the nape of a rat pup’s neck and it will squeal ultrasonically in a soundgram pattern like that of a human giggle. Rats dream as we dream, in epic narratives of navigation and thwarted efforts at escape: When scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tracked the neuronal activity of rats in REM sleep, the researchers saw the same firing patterns they had seen in wakeful rats wending their way through those notorious rat mazes.

Rats can learn to crave the same drugs that we do — alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, amphetamine — and they, like us, will sometimes indulge themselves to death. They’re sociable, curious and love to be touched — nicely, that is. If a rat has been trained to associate a certain sound with a mild shock to its tail, and the bell tolls but the shock doesn’t come, the rat will inhale deeply with what can only be called a sigh of relief.

When it comes to sex, the analogies between rats and humans are “profound,” said James G. Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal. “It’s not simply instinctual for them,” he said. “Rats know what good sex is and what bad sex is. And when they have reason to anticipate great sex, they give you every indication they’re looking forward to it.”

There are more than 120 species of rat in the world, but only two have become serious human pests: the black rat notorious for its role in spreading plague, and the larger brown rat, also called the Norway rat because it was mistakenly thought to have entered Europe through Norway. The Norway rat has largely displaced the black rat as prime urban vermin, and it’s the rat you see in trash cans, parks and on subway platforms. The so-called fancy rats that people keep as pets are variants of the Norway rat, usually albino though sometimes mottled like calico cats, and bred to have docile temperaments.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

illustration { Tomer Hanuka }

related { Rats are being trained by police in Colombia to sniff out landmines, with the help of cats }

Pinkberry’s frozen yogurt is popular with people — and rats. The vermin were seen scurrying around the Upper East Side Pinkberry Yogurt Shop Sunday morning.

Rats were also a few from the yogurt machine, and that’s not far from bins of fresh fruit toppings. The Health Department closed that eatery. { FoxNY | Continue reading }

In celebration of the store’s opening at 15 Broad Street between Exchange and Wall Streets (now slated for Friday the 22nd), Hermès is giving away free cones of il laboratorio del gelato all week. { Racked | Continue reading }

+ {Ratatouille | long excerpt }

Something is occurring at a major pharmaceuticals company, Wyeth, where rodents tested in its labs have taken on some features of the human brain.

Wyeth’s animals are slow-witted, confused and forgetful because they suffer from the crippling dementia of Alzheimer’s disease, which they acquired from a transplanted human gene.

Something else extraordinary is going on at Wyeth. The company’s scientists not only can give rodents Alzheimer’s — they have also figured out how to take it away. Curing mice is a lot simpler than curing people, but the results are a tantalizing development that offers hope to humans suffering from the disease. The work also advances what Wyeth executives describe as their war on Alzheimer’s. { NY Times | Continue reading }

{ Rat Fink poster }

Deep in the heart of the Florida Keys, wildlife officials are laying bait laced with poison to try to wipe out a colony of enormous African rats that could threaten crops and other animals.

U.S. federal and state officials are beginning the final phase of a two-year project to eradicate the Gambian pouched rats, which can grow to the size of a cat and began reproducing in the remote area about eight years ago. “This is the only place in the United States where this is occurring,” said Gary Witmer, a biologist.

A former exotic pet breeder, living in a small house, bred the species and allowed the critters to escape. Without eradication, wildlife officials fear the rats could eventually make their way onto the Florida mainland where they could quickly destroy fragile ecosystems.

Unlike the wood rats, the Gambian rats “don’t have any real friends, that we can tell,” said Scott Hardin, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s exotic species coordinator. { NY Times | Continue reading }

illustration { Ed Roth’s Rat Fink }

The multitasking Mr. Carter’s day job is editor of Vanity Fair magazine. On the side, he has also spread his wings by writing books, producing and consulting on movies, and even acting in them (who could forget his star turn in the 2004 remake of “Alfie�”).

Then, late last year, Mr. Carter and some partners opened the Waverly Inn in the West Village to a limited clientele, a sort of neighborhood snack bar for movie stars, fashion designers and people who wear Belgian loafers. Serving things like truffled macaroni and cheese in a charmingly disheveled town house may be just another form of content providing. And by all accounts, tables at the Waverly Inn, 16 Bank Street at Waverly Place, are packed.

But on March 28, the restaurant failed an inspection with the city’s health department. The restaurant was cited for nine different violations, including “mildew buildup�” inside an ice machine and “mouse activity present in that approximately 20 fresh mice excreta observed on floor under flavor syrup storage racks in basement.�”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Aristotle declared that humans are the only animal to laugh, but then, he never saw this video of Jaak Panksepp tickling rats.

When you play it, you’ll hear the tickled rats chirping — an ultrasonic noise that’s audible thanks to the special equipment that enabled Dr. Panksepp and his colleagues to discover this phenomenon. Young rats make the same chirp when they chase and play with one another, and they like to hang out with other rats who chirp at this frequency (50 kHz). It seems to be a happy sound: rats will run mazes and press levers in order to be tickled, and they’ll emit the same chirp when the dopamine reward circuits in the brain are stimulated.

Some researchers still aren’t sure these sounds qualify as animal laughter, but Dr. Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, has been systematically gathering evidence of the parallels to human laughter. He hypothesizes that our most sophisticated forms of verbal humor tickle ancient brain circuits like the ones in the chirping rats. { NY Times | Continue reading }

+ previously { The extraordinary dexterity with which rats use their whiskers }

Rats usually have an innate fear of cat urine. The fear extends to rodents that have never seen a feline and those generations removed from ever meeting a cat.

After they get infected with the brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii, however, rats become attracted to cat pee, increasing the chance they’ll become cat food. This much researchers knew. But a new study shows the parasite, which also infects more half the world’s human population, seems to target a rat’s fear of cat urine with almost surgical precision, leaving other kinds of fear alone.

This discovery could shed light on “how fear is generated in the first place” and how people can potentially better manage phobias, researcher Ajai Vyas, a Stanford University neuroscientist, told LiveScience.

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasitic germ whose primary hosts are cats. However, it can be found in most warm-blooded animals, including an estimated 50 million people in the United States. One study suggests the parasite has altered human behavior enough to shape entire cultures. (…)

Future investigations can explore how exactly the parasite modifies the brain in such a precise manner. Scientists might also want to see whether infected rats become less afraid of pictures of cats or scents of different predators of rats. { Live Science | Continue reading }

photo { The Rat Collector, 1908 }

previously { The Creepiest Control Freak Ever }

{ A rat catcher showing his ferrets, NYC, 1920s | Ferrets were used to kill rodents }