In New Zealand, rats have caused a lot of trouble for locals as an invasive animal. Especially in New Zealand, since the rats have multiplied in large numbers, many rare local birds have been eaten by rats.
And every summer, this group of rats will multiply in large numbers, causing more serious losses.
Cute-looking little mice sometimes cause big trouble
To address this issue, the New Zealand government has launched a rat eradication campaign to wipe out all rats in the area by 2050.
Now that this campaign has been going on for a few years, what are the results?
Early rat control activities due to the use of a large number of drug treatment programs, although the effect of rat control is good, but still caused casualties in other organisms. This situation was not improved until the advent of a new type of rat trap equipment, and now the rat infestation in New Zealand is not as serious as it was at the beginning, and everything seems to be developing in reverse.
In order to solve the impact of rats on us, humans are also painstaking
Leaving aside the term invasive species, rats, as the most common rodent in the world, have a destructive power for all to see. Rat extermination has been in Europe as early as the Middle Ages, and there are also rat extermination movements due to rat infestations in ancient times, and even the four pests of the last century have a plan for rats.
So what are the habits of rats? What harm will it bring to humanity? How do they affect the biological world? How do mice transmit disease? The next step of this paper will answer these questions from the two aspects of mouse biometrics and effects, and biological chain circulation. Finally, what would be the impact if rats around the world suddenly died? Will humanity also suffer the catastrophe?
Will rats be able to coexist peacefully with us?
Annoying rats
Sewers, stinky ditches, mountains in the fields, and even our own bedrooms, we can see signs of rat activity in these places. Rats have not destroyed humans for a day or two, and the most common rats are brown rats in the order Rodent, which is also the most destructive type of rat.
Thanks to their strong reproductive ability, brown rats take only 6 weeks to complete sexual maturation, reaching social maturity in about half a year.
As long as the rats enter the mature stage can give birth to several or even a dozen juvenile rats, and then after several rounds of circulation, the mouse family can develop hundreds. Whether it is a wild brown rat or a home brown rat, they carry many different zoonotic pathogens.
Rats living in sewers always carry a lot of bacteria with them
For example: leptospiroides, Toxoplasma gondii, Campylobacter, etc., and parasites that parasitize them, such as tropical rat fleas, which carry microorganisms that cause the Black Death.
As a host for tropical rat fleas, rats are often exposed to human food or direct contact during long-term activities. In the Middle Ages, when sanitary conditions were not developed, the sudden outbreak of the Black Death took the lives of millions of people.
Not only in the Middle Ages, according to scientists, since the Stone Age, humans have been infested by rats. As a result, rats have long been considered a deadly pest. And if rats become invasive species, the harm will be even greater.
Pesky rats always affect our lives
Since there are no natural enemies, rats reproduce more rapidly. Once rats become invasive species, the most obvious problem it brings is grassland degradation.
Because many rodents will choose to drill holes in grassland areas and will also eat the roots of herbaceous plants.
When humans entered the Age of Discovery, rats followed ships all over the world, and it is difficult to find a place that has not been invaded by rats today. At present, the only place that has not been invaded by rats is the polar region, if it is not too cold in the polar region, and there is not much trace of human activity, I am afraid that they will be found here.
I am afraid that only this extremely cold glacier can stop the pace of rats
Everywhere and at any time, rats are an unwelcome species. Because of its bad effects, people have also been trying to find ways to eliminate them. If one day, rats are suddenly wiped out, what will be the result?
Positive effects of rodents
Rats are not exactly a pest, at least compared to the natural world, the harm of rats in human society is mainly reflected in the reproductive capacity, nibbling on building furniture, disease transmission and so on. If they are mice in their natural environment, when they are in a balanced food chain, they actually maintain the ecological balance between regions.
Biological chains are also indispensable to the rats
Rats, as an important link in the food chain, are involved in many biological activities, and if all rats are extinct (all rodent rats, not only brown rats), it will cause a serious ecological crisis and human beings will suffer extinction.
In addition to the brown rat, which is a large rat with strong destructive power, the activity of other mice is actually not as strong as that of the brown rat. In the desert regions of Arizona, several species of marsupial rats maintain the local ecosystem. This marsupial mouse is characterized by the fact that they have a nursery bag and move by beating.
There are kangaroos that look much cuter than brown rats
Originally, the Chihuahua Desert in southeastern Arizona was originally a desert plain, but with their presence, it has become an arid grassland. That sounds incredible, right? But this is true because they can spread plant seeds.
Desolate desert plains can also be full of life because of marsupial rats
Some kangaroos forage for large seeds, have a habit of storing food, and live in burrows like other rodents. The seeds are also carried underground, which gives local plants the opportunity to grow, and for birds that need to eat seeds, the reduction in the number of seeds on the ground forces birds to go to other areas to feed.
On the other hand, when they build caves, they intersperse each other and turn a lot of soil, forming many shallow pits and small mounds. This change contributes to the decomposition of plant litter, thereby promoting plant growth with shorter growth years. This series of activity changes led to the natural transition of arizona's desert to grassland.
There are kangaroos with the magic to turn the desert into an oasis
The behavior of kangaroos is not only seen in these extreme environmental areas, but also in some forests. Seeds produced by different tree species at the same time are transmitted off-site due to the activity of rats. For example, the Chinese rat and the needle-haired rat will carry the seeds of oak trees and cork oak, and the seed regulation effect of rats will help plants to spread tree species.
Rats are also nature's porters
If we zoom in on the entire biosphere, the presence of rats is indispensable from the perspective of the structure of the biological chain.
Why can't rats be exterminated?
The food chain can be simply divided into three hierarchical relationships, producer, consumer and decomposer, with a more specific eliminator.
The food chain is tightly clasped
For producers, such organisms are at the bottom of the food chain, and they provide the most basic biological needs for the upper organisms, mainly in terms of food.
Plants often are
The consumer is where most species exist, and in this layer, consumers take advantage of the benefits of the producer while helping the producer to cycle. The decomposer decomposes and digests the biological corpses of these other two positions, and finally completes the closed loop of the entire food chain.
Rats are definitely consumer representatives in the biological chain
What makes the scavenger special is that it is not able to complete the food chain cycle like the decomposer, but is somewhere between the consumer and the decomposer. Scavengers, such as bald eagles, act as decomposition and accelerate the energy and carbon cycles in the ecosystem. Without them completing this delivery, ecosystems would be out of balance.
The representative of the purger is the vulture
For mice, although they are not cleaners, they can act as consumers and producers. This two-way mutually beneficial activity can further stabilize the balance of the food chain, which is not a single chain structure.
It is precisely a food network in which each important species is interspersed to affect the balance of another population.
If the rat ring collapses, then this will affect their predators, and predators will affect the biological activities of the next layer after reducing the source of food, whether it is flooding or decreasing, the bottom food chain will also collapse, eventually causing the entire food chain to break, and eventually affecting human society. Humanity may not be destroyed, but the devastation of its original lives may not be so great.
Rats also have a cute side, and their presence is not entirely harmful
Based on the previous introduction, it is clear that we can infer that without the herd of marsupials, the desert of Arizona would be difficult to transform into an arid grassland. This change just goes to show that rats are not exactly an absolute pest, and because of their location and environment, they can produce different effects.
Although rats will cause more destruction in human society, the solution is not only extinction. Therefore, it is not absolutely good or bad for any species to survive on this planet, but more importantly, how do we look at them?