There is a group of rats who crossed the sea from China to the UK, and at some point grew into a half-meter-long giant Mac, rampaging everywhere in British towns and cities, and even almost dug up the mountains by the sea to collapse!
These giant rats, in fact, are the same animals as China's palm-sized wild mice, can they grow so big to eat something strange, or are they directly mutated? How scary are the rats that are flooded?
I can't imagine catching such a big mouse in my own home...
Rats are plagued, or Big Mac mice
The town of Tenby in southern Wales, England, is a tourist attraction, the town's beach is rated as "the best beach in Europe", and the best scenic hill called Castle Hill is a very popular walking spot for residents.
Tourist attraction "Tenby Beach"
However, in recent months, the residents of the town have not dared to go up the mountain, because the mountain is full of holes made by rats, all about the size of rabbit holes, underground caves are many and complex, on the side of the cliff near the sea, there are so many holes that the mountain structure is loosened and there is a risk of collapse.
Local residents take photos of the cliffs to see how big these rats are
It's fine if these rats are just in the mountains, but the truth is that there are more rats in the city than in the mountains, and they are more terrifying.
Two months ago, a resident was resting in the living room of his apartment when a brown mouse the size of a kitten hit his leg and fled to the corner of the room and disappeared.
Even the town's council garden has many rat holes, and whenever the sun sets, when the rats come out to feed, you can often see rats with an average length of forty or fifty centimeters on the street, with tails as thick as a twine.
Feel the extra large rat
Giant rats like this are not a unique "specialty" of Tenby Town. In 2016, in another town of Aldershot, England, a group of rats broke into a resident's home and bit a baby. The largest of these mice weighs more than 4 kilograms, which is larger than the average domestic cat.
Look at the ratio of mouse traps to rats
In a small town in the South Cape Town, you can catch a rat about 30 centimeters long in the grass, and if you add a tail, the head is half a meter long.
Also in 2016, a gas engineer saw a giant dead mouse in the bushes near London's playground, measuring a staggering 1.21 meters from head to tail tip.
The full picture that is hard to find, how can it be 1 meter long if you straighten the amount
What do mice eat to grow that big?
Residents of the British town of Tenby who have owned a café for 30 years say that the rats have always lived here, and there used to be a special rodent control staff to deal with the rodent infestation, but now there is none, so this year's rats are particularly rampant.
And the reason why these mice can grow to be about the size of kittens is basically caused by humans.
This is already a regular body type
The beach in Tenby Town is a famous tourist attraction in the UK, and about 2 million tourists come to the town every year, basically everyone goes to the beach, and many people feed wild seagulls here.
The British food is high in sugar, oil and protein, which is originally the favorite food of mice, and all kinds of kitchen waste leftovers can feed a large number of rats nearby if they are not cleaned up in time, and the food that tourists feed seagulls adds a big meal to the rats.
Another important reason is that the main way humans clean up mice is by poisoning, such as putting poison bait, spraying rodenticide, etc., but many mice and humans have coexisted for too long, and have long mutated resistance to traditional rat poison and passed on this gene.
There is another reason, mice are a very adaptable animal, they adapt to life in human society faster than natural enemies such as eagles, snakes, and ferrets, and the only remaining natural enemy stray cats, because they are regularly fed by humans or catch other animals can also be full, and will not specifically catch mice.
"The rat is standing up!"
Finally, mice are particularly capable of giving birth is also an important reason, generally rodent mice, at least three or four times a year, more often five or six times, a litter at least seven or eight cubs, up to 18 is possible.
There is a lot of food and no natural enemies, no one can catch it by drilling into the corner, mutated to the point that even rat poison is not afraid, in such an environment without survival pressure, any animal can easily grow bigger and bigger.
The brown house rats photographed in China are really small and exquisite compared to their relatives in the UK
Rats in England, but home in China?
If the giant rats that flood the town of Tenby are reduced to a dozen centimeters, we are no strangers at all, because these rats are brown house rats that can also be found everywhere in the country.
Brown house mouse is originally a large mouse, also called big mouse, white-tailed hanger, dung rat, dung rat, ditch rat, etc., the average body length of adults is between 13-23 cm, and the female is slightly smaller.
Isn't it familiar?
This kind of mouse is now the main domestic type of rat, basically eighty percent live in buildings, to winter will not hibernate, but when the weather is cold, out of less, now the northern hemisphere began to spring, the temperature rises, the British rats will also come out active.
Brown house mice are mainly active at night, and animals like them with small eyes or nocturnal walking basically do not have good eyesight, but brown house rats have a sensitive sense of smell and touch, enough to make them unimpeded in the city.
Larger brown house mice can also prey on pigeons
In addition, brown house mice can be regarded as one of the earliest animals associated with humans, and the experience of long-term human life has led to some adaptive evolution.
In addition to drug resistance, their memory and vigilance are very high, they can remember where there is food, and they will also be wary of sudden extra things in their usual range of activity, which is why mice basically do not eat when the bait is put in at the beginning.
It is precisely because it has been associated with humans for a long time, so brown house mice have long followed humans to all over the world, and populations in different regions have a certain degree of genetic differences, resulting in new subspecies, and these brown house mice in the UK have also lived locally for many years.
British garbage feeds a lot of rats
However, some scientists have done genetic testing on mice everywhere, from the genetic lineage analysis, the world's brown house mice originated in northern China with a relatively warm climate, along Mongolia, Siberia, Central Asia all the way to Europe, and then followed the geographical discoveries of Europeans and later human activities, spread to the whole world, now only the Arctic continent has no brown house rats.
The British also like to tan the rats they catch
In addition to brown house rats, another giant rat that is rampant in the UK is the Gambian rat, the real scientific name is the Gambian kangaroo, native to sub-Saharan Africa, because of the love to store food in the cheek pouch of the mouth.
The average size of the Gambian kangaroo is larger than that of the brown house mouse, most of which can grow to more than 70 cm in the wild environment, and after domestication, it is tame, and can be used as a pet, and can also be trained to use its sense of smell to find mines.
There are kangaroos in The Gambia who like to eat bananas after work
The 1.21-meter-long dead mouse found next to the London playground in the United Kingdom is a Gambian kangaroo, according to local reports, it is very likely that the British pet dealer introduced and escaped, in the United Kingdom, which is a very suitable place for rats, can easily grow into a giant mouse.
What happens to people after the rat infestation?
Just on March 20, it was reported that the customs of Shanghai Pudong International Airport caught the first live mouse that wanted to sneak into the country this year, hiding it on an inbound aircraft.
Customs catches smuggling rats
Customs officers caught the little mouse wearing protective clothing, and after 48 hours of monitoring and inspection, it was determined that there were no traces of other rats, and quarantine treatments such as comprehensive pest removal and disinfection were carried out before the aircraft was allowed to continue normal operations.
The reason why a mouse causes such a big reaction is because this little mouse with the scientific name of the black-threaded rat is a domestic mouse like the brown house mouse, and it is a well-known pathogen carrier, which is a very dangerous vector organism, and if it does not do so, it may cause foreign viruses to flood in China.
"Involved" little mouse
Many kinds of mice associated with humans, as well as parasites such as fleas on their bodies, can transmit more than 20 diseases such as epidemic hemorrhagic fever, plague, yàng, schistosomiasis, toxoplasmosis, tick-borne relapsing fever, etc., and the fatality and infectivity of several diseases are still very high.
However, the terrible thing about the rat infestation is that it is difficult to cure, even if the rats outside the country are blocked at the entry and exit gates, the local rats cannot be killed, and their numbers can only be controlled within a safe range.
Physical rat hunting is a common way (you can compare it with the rats caught by the British above)
Rats living with humans, basically each of them has a very strong ability to survive, can climb vertically, can swim and dive, move extremely fast, have a strong ability to bite, eat very non-picky eaters, candles, soap, wood, rubber and even bricks and plastics can make them fill their stomachs, hungry and cannibalistic, in human society to starve mice is basically impossible.
Domestic rats, represented by brown house mice, are harmful animals all over the world, in addition to spreading diseases, but also damage buildings, valuables, precision instruments, electrical wires and other items, and are also the most common in rural China, the most harmful to food storage of a mouse.
Fortunately, the rat population in China is well controlled, and there is no huge size and large-scale flooding like British rats, of course, no one should want to see mice about the same size as cats with their own eyes, so just take a look in our article.
Resources:
"The English town was attacked by giant rats, the size of a cat, and the mountain was about to collapse!? • Those things in England
"Airport interception of live rat vector organisms" Liberation Daily
"Brown House Mouse" · Medical Encyclopedia
"200 million rats in the UK are not afraid of rat poison, even cats are afraid of house invasion, children are bitten" · Sina News