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Watch Rats! What, Where, and How on Epic

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Rat Information for Kids: Fun Rodent Facts for Students

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Rat Information for Kids: Fun Rodent Facts for Students

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Rodent Facts for Kids

An adult rat can squeeze into your home through a hole as small as the size of a quarter.

Rats can live for up to 18 months, but most die before they are one year old.

Rats have strong teeth that allow them to chew through glass, cinderblock, wire, aluminum and lead.

Smell, taste, touch and sound help direct them to their food sources.

Rats are also responsible for spreading bubonic plague, also known as the "Black Death". Although fleas are primarily responsible for infecting humans, they were originally infected with the plague by feeding on the blood of rats.

Rats are scavengers. They have an excellent sense of taste and a good memory. A rat can identify certain substances, including rat poisons, after just a tiny taste of it.

Parents, find more facts and information about rodents to share with your kids at PestWorld.org. To learn how to get rid of roof rats and other rodents, visit the official NPMA website.

Norway Rats

The Norway rat is also called a "sewer rat". Norway rats tend to be larger and more aggressive to animals, humans and each other than Roof rats.

Diet:

Norway rats eat a wide variety of foods but mostly prefer cereal grains, meats, fish, nuts, and some fruits.

Habitat:

When Norway rats invade buildings, they usually remain in the basement or ground floor. They also live in fields, farms, woodpiles and buildings. Their nests are usually lined with shredded paper or cloth.

Impact:

These rats are known for the damage they cause by chewing on materials, urinating on food and eating stored foods. They have also been known to chew on wires, which can cause fires to start. They also carry disease and ectoparasites. Rats will also attack both animals and humans. Human babies and even adults have been killed in rat attacks.

Prevention:

Rats will eat almost anything, so keep your homes clean and don't leave food out.

Make sure that your home and storage areas are clean and dry.

Make sure that you clean your sheds, crawlspaces, and garbage cans often.

Close up any small holes and cracks they can come in through.

Find more information on Norway rats to share with the kids in your classroom at the official NPMA website.

Roof Rats

Roof Rats are excellent climbers and get their name because they usually live high off the ground, like on the roof of a building. They have very poor vision and are color blind, but they have extremely strong senses of hearing, smell, touch and taste. Rats have four to six litters a year and each litter has 6 to 12 babies in it. These rats are only pregnant for about 21 to 23 days and they can start reproducing when they are three months old.

Diet:

Roof Rats prefer eating fruits, berries, vegetables, cereal, pet food, nuts, grain, slugs, snails and rotten food.

Habitat:

Roof Rats are excellent climbers and they usually live in spaces on the tops of buildings, on roofs or in attics. They also live in sheds, garages, boxes, ceilings, under floors, in wood heaps and in thick grass.

Impact:

Roof rats cause damage to structures by chewing, eating stored foods and carrying diseases, such as Hantavirus. They are most famous for spreading the highly contagious bubonic plague in the Middle Ages. Rats will also attack both animals and humans. Human babies and even adults have been killed in rat attacks.

Prevention:

Rats like to eat, so keep your homes clean and do not leave food out.

Make sure that your home and storage areas are clean and dry.

Make sure that you clean your sheds, crawlspaces, and garbage cans often.

Close up any small holes and cracks they can come in through.

Find more educational information for use in your classroom, including a profile on roof rats, at the official NPMA website.

More fun with pests

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Rat Information for Kids: Fun Rodent Facts for Students

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An adult rat can squeeze into your home through a hole as small as the size of a quarter. Rats can live for up to 18 months, but most die before they are one year old. Rats have strong teeth that allow them to chew through glass, cinderblock, wire, aluminum and lead.

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Hero Rat Wins A Top Animal Award For Sniffing Out Land Mines

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Hero Rat Wins A Top Animal Award For Sniffing Out Land Mines

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For the first time, one of Britain's highest animal honors has been awarded to a rat. The animal has detected dozens of land mines in Cambodia and is believed to have saved lives.

Magawa is a Tanzanian-born African giant pouched rat who has been trained by the nonprofit APOPO to sniff out explosives. With careful training, he and his rat colleagues learn to identify land mines and alert their human handlers, so the mines can be safely removed.

Even among his skilled cohorts working in Cambodia, Magawa is a standout sniffer: In four years he has helped to clear more than 1.5 million square feet of land - an area about the size of 20 soccer fields. In the process, he has found 39 land mines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance.

In a virtual ceremony Friday, the U.K. charity PDSA gave Magawa its gold medal for his lifesaving work.

"This is the very first time in our 77-year history of honoring animals that we will have presented a medal to a rat," PDSA Chair John Smith said during the proceedings.

The group started giving out medalsduring World War II to recognize animals for gallantry in the face of conflict. Previous honorees have included dogs, pigeons, horses and a cat.

Magawa's medal is perfectly rat-sized and fits onto his work harness.

Christophe Cox, APOPO's CEO and co-founder, said the organization began exploring new explosive-detection techniques after an analysis found that land mine detection was "the most expensive and tedious part of the problem."

"That's why we came up with the idea of using rats, because rats are fast. They can screen an area of 200 square meters in half an hour - something which would take a manual deminer four days," Cox said at the virtual ceremony.

Magawa is part of a cohort of rats bred by APOPO for this purpose. He was born in Tanzania in 2014, socialized and moved to Siem Reap, Cambodia, in 2016 to begin his bomb-sniffing career.

APOPO uses positive reinforcement methods that give the rats food rewards for accomplishing tasks such as finding a target or walking across a surface. Then they're trained in scent discrimination: choosing explosive smells over something else to get a food reward.

Though they have terrible eyesight, the rats are ideal for such work, with their extraordinary sense of smell and their light weight - they are too light to trigger the mines. When they detect a mine, they lightly scratch atop it, signaling to their handler what they've found.

Their reward: a banana.

Cox said the rats hone their skills in a training field and are only cleared to begin work once they have perfect accuracy over an 8,600-square-foot area with various stages of complexity.

"We really trust our rats, because very often after clearing a minefield, our teams will play a game of soccer on the cleared field to assure the quality of our work," he said.

Cox said the rats have freed more than 1 million people from the terror of living with land mines.

On weekends, the rats get special feast meals. And once their skills wane, they go to a rat retirement home where they get food and play for the rest of their days.

Cox said he hopes the award will bring more attention to the cause to which Magawa and his human colleagues are devoted. "We hope we can solve the land mine problem in the next five to 10 years. But it needs the engagement and the support of the wider public."

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Hero Rat Wins A Top Animal Award For Sniffing Out Land Mines

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For the first time, one of Britain's highest animal honors has been awarded to a rat. The animal has detected dozens of land mines in Cambodia and is believed to have saved lives. Magawa is a Tanzanian-born African giant pouched rat who has been trained by the nonprofit APOPO to sniff out explosives.

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A new study shows that empathy may drive rats to help each other. The finding gives insight into the biological roots of our urge to assist others in need. The model the researchers developed will also provide an opportunity for further study.

Empathy motivates us to take action. We feel distressed when another is suffering, and we want to stop it. Other primates like apes are also known to help each other when they perceive distress. Rats share the distress of other rats as well, but whether they would take the next step to assist a fellow rat in distress was unknown. Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, Dr. Jean Decety and Dr. Peggy Mason at the University of Chicago developed a model to test whether rats would be driven by empathy to help each other.

For each hour-long test session, the scientists put pairs of rats together in cages. One rat roamed freely, and the other was restrained in a clear tube at the center of the cage. Each tube had a door that could be nudged open only from the outside by the free rat. The study, which was funded by NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Science Foundation, was described in Science on December 9, 2011.

After an average of 7 daily sessions, most rats learned how to quickly release the door to set their captive companion free. When the rat was first released, the scientists observed, the pairs raced around and explored the cage together. In contrast, free rats paid little attention to tube restraints that were empty or contained only a toy rat.

Even when the free rats were denied access to the liberated rat, the rats still opened the restrainer. This showed that the free rats weren't opening the doors to have a playmate. Rather, they were opening the door specifically to release the trapped rat.

To test how much value the rats placed on liberating a trapped cagemate, the scientists presented rats with 2 restrainers - one with a rat inside and another containing 5 chocolate chips, a favorite rat snack. A free rat could choose to eat all the treats himself by opening the chocolate restrainer first or blocking the entrance to the chocolate restrainer. But the researchers found that the free rats opened the restrainers in no consistent order and allowed their liberated cagemates an average of 1.5 chips. When an empty restrainer was paired with a chocolate-containing one, the free rats ate all 5 chocolates.

"That was very compelling," Mason says. "It said to us that essentially helping their cagemate is on a par with chocolate. He can hog the entire chocolate stash if he wanted to, and he does not. We were shocked."

"This is the first evidence of helping behavior triggered by empathy in rats," Decety says. The researchers are now using this model to explore further questions, such as whether the role of empathy in motherhood might make females more likely to become door openers than males.

"All of this tells us that acting on empathic feelings to help another in need is a biological and in fact a neurobiological mandate," Mason says. "It's in our brain."

- by Harrison Wein, Ph.D.

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A new study shows that empathy may drive rats to help each other. The finding gives insight into the biological roots of our urge to assist others in need.

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Let's talk about pets: The Facts on Rats

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Let's talk about pets: The Facts on Rats

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