LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Rats: Food
built 814 days ago
Rats eat almost anything that humans eat. Rats transmit a variety of diseases as many as 35. Diseases may be spread by: eating food contaminated by rodent droppings or urine, contact with rat urine, parasites which live on rodents and if you are bitten by a rodent.
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Management of rats and other rodents always begins with a systematic survey and evaluation of the potentially infested site. Estimates of pest numbers and a map of the infested site should be generated. The potentially infested site should be cleaned, removing all possible food sources for the rodents. The site should be altered to eliminate all favorable nesting habitat and to eliminate any passageways that might exist form outside points into adjacent structures. When a structure is infested, intense trapping, using large numbers of traps should be attempted along with the structural and habitat modifications. All park staff and visitors should be fully informed of the mission of the control effort and the reasons for the infestation.
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Born in a nest about 21 to 23 days after conception, the young rats are naked and their eyes are closed. The 5 to 8 young in the litter develop rapidly, growing hair within a week. When they are 9 to 14 days old, their eyes open and they begin to explore for food and move about near their nest. In the third week they begin to take solid food. The number of litters depends on the area and varies with nearness to the limit of their climatic range, availability of nutritious food, density of the local rat population and age of the rat. The young may continue to nurse until 4 or 5 weeks old.
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Working as a team, naked mole-rats make for extremely efficient excavators. Robert Brett of the Zoological Society of London once observed a naked mole-rat colony dig a mile-long tunnel in less than three months. In all, a typical underground colony of about 80 animals can cover the area of twenty football fields. If all the tunnels were laid out in a straight line, they would extend to several miles in length. Branching, interconnected networks of tunnels link up nest areas, toilet chambers, and food sources. Major ‘highway’ tunnels are wide enough for two naked mole-rats to travel side by side and include turnouts for the animals to back into and change directions.
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Although roof rats get their name from their tendency to be found in the upper parts of buildings they can ... be found under, in, and around structures. Ranging in size from 6 to 8 inches in length, not including their tails, roof rats only need a space of one-half inch to get into buildings. These pests have very poor vision and are color blind, but they have extremely strong senses of hearing, smell, touch and taste. Cautious by nature, these rats prefer eating fruits, vegetables and cereal and typically eat their fill in one sitting. Roof rats are known for the damage they cause by chewing on materials, eating stored foods and carrying diseases. They secured their place in history by spreading the highly dangerous bubonic plague.
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Scientists surmise that a harsh environment drove naked mole-rats and Damaraland mole-rats to evolve an unorthodox lifestyle. In the tropical savannas and grasslands these species inhabit, years can pass without rain. Baked by the sun, the soil becomes brick-hard and extremely difficult to dig through. Food sources, although found in large clumps, are widely and unpredictably scattered. Mole-rats appear to search for food at random, finding roots and tubers seemingly by luck. Probably because the dry soil does not carry odors very well, mole-rats can burrow right past a big tuber without knowing it. Under these circumstances, an individual mole-rat is likely to starve before it ever finds food.
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