Leviathan Press: Rat King, it is estimated that many people first think of the "king of rats", but the rat king really has nothing to do with the "king", but a bunch of rats in some strange and terrible way to form a "group"... It is no wonder that people in history have been afraid of this creepy "rat king", which is visually unacceptable just, so it is understandable that the superstition of treating it as some ominous sign is understandable. However, if it is really not someone who deliberately spoofs, these rat kings really give rodent experts a headache...
In addition, if you are planning to eat breakfast or have already eaten breakfast, it is not recommended to continue reading.
Text/Alexandra Ossola
Translation/Yang Rui
Proofreading/Shi Wei
Original/www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-complicated-inconclusive-truth-behind-rat-kings
Rat King in 16th-century illustration (partial)
The Otago Museum is located in Dunedin, New Zealand. On the top floor of the museum, there is a collection of peeled lion specimens, a tooth of a large shark, and a delicate and fragile glass model of marine life. One specimen "stands out" in the collection: a giant glass jar filled with a pale yellow liquid containing eight rats; they sink at the bottom of the jar, their tails wrapped around a thick knot floating in the liquid, tying them tightly together.
The label of the jar was written with only two words — "Rat King." For hundreds of years, both the so-called "rat king" and such a group of rats with their tails linked together have been deified and even unreal. At least, it never came under natural conditions. Despite this, pop culture has mythologized it and appeared in countless works of fiction. Rat Kings are often seen as ominous signs, or as representatives of plagues, or as closely related to witchcraft. But experts are skeptical; they've been trying to solve the rat king mystery all along. Most people agree with this: if rat kings appear in natural conditions, they are disgusting to humans; for rats, they may not be a happy thing, because they will be used by humans to observe and study.
Kevin Rowe is a rodent expert and senior curator of the Mammal Exhibition at the Victoria Museum in Australia. "Rodents entangled together don't live long, they suffer greatly until they are separated from each other or die together," he argues. Moreover, the rat king may simply be a sphere formed by the rats entangled together, which will only make the rat suffer; these have nothing to do with the concept of 'king'. ”
Specimens of the Rat King in the Otago Museum's collection
Since the 16th century, there have been reports of the Rat King, and there are records of the Rat King all over the world. It has been suggested that the rat king is naturally formed and can consist of up to dozens of rats—they may be juvenile rats born to the same mother—confined to a small space with their tails tightly wrapped; or that the low temperature forces them to huddle together for warmth. Rattus rattus, also known as boat rats or black rats, are the only rat species in all accounts where a rat king has ever appeared. However, this phenomenon of tail entanglement has also been found in other small mammals such as squirrels.
Emma Burns, curator of natural sciences at the Otago Museum, proposes: "According to some theories, black rats like to climb, so their tails ... Will reflexively wrap tightly around other things. In the rat nest, they would be tightly intertwined. ”
That is, the tail may wrap the rats tightly together. Under the action of some kind of adhesive, their tails are tightly glued together, and it is difficult to separate. These binders could be sebum, a sticky oily substance secreted by mouse skin, or they may be urine or feces they excrete. Burns believes that at least that's how the Rat King at the Otago Museum was formed. The Rat King of Otago was discovered around the 1930s. At the time, they fell from the rafters of the shipping office to the employees. According to records, there were also employees with pitchforks hitting the writhing creature. It wasn't long before the rats died at the hands of the museum curator and were made into specimens.
Specimen of the King rat preserved at the Science Museum Altenburg in Thuringia, Germany
The Rat King on display at the Nantes' Natural History Museum
At the same time, rat experts have also become more suspicious, taking a step back from their previous claims, acknowledging that in natural conditions... A rat king may appear. Michael Parsons, a resident scholar at Hofstra University, said: "In particularly cold situations, rats would wrap their tails around each other and keep each other warm. He also developed a remote sensing technique to observe how rats behave in urban environments. "Rat kings may be more common than we think — but they probably won't last long. Once the temperature rises, their tails loosen; if a mouse bites its own or another mouse's tail (oh my God!). ), they also loosen up on each other. ”
Others have a different view of this.
Around 1683, Friedrich Wilhelm Schmuck depicted the Rat King
Matthew Combs is a PhD student at Fordham University in the United States, with a focus on mice. He said: "The Rat King may just be a myth, a myth made up by some people with false examples. "Even if the motives of these modern counterfeit rat kings are not clear, and the counterfeiting process is not necessarily easy, the possibility of such counterfeiting still exists." If someone wants to make a rat king out, he has to tie the rats together after they die. To do this on live mice is "almost impossible."
However, whether true or false, human aversion to rats has never changed, and the rat king may always be with us. In our opinion, many rats entangled together mean that more bad things will happen. Because we are full of hatred and disgust for rats.
Illustration of the black rat (right) and the Alexander rat (left), 1920.
Burns pointed out: "People in the Middle Ages hated rats, and even more hated to see a large group of rats. People really don't like rats. ”
For her, the study of the Rat King continued. She plans to work with other researchers to study the knot in the rat king specimen to find out what kind of adhesive sticks the tail together. They also intend to use X-rays to create a model of how the rats first entangled themselves. But Combs believes that in theory, it is possible to study live mice in the laboratory, but this kind of research will not be of much significance.
He also pointed out: "If you want to observe the whole process of the formation of the rat king in a laboratory environment, it not only takes a lot of time and luck, but also a lot of financial support." ”
That is to say, at least for now, the mystery of the Rat King will continue.
The phenomenon of tail entanglement has also been found in small mammals such as squirrels.
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