NEW YORK – Tourists took selfies and office workers guzzled coffee inside Manhattan’s Bryant Park. But under bushes, on subway grates and between trash cans in the heart of the country’s largest city, their feet were littered with rat traps, bars and contraceptive snacks.
At a quiet 9.6-acre gathering place in New York City, the pranks seem to be under control. A prank is what is called a swarm of rats. These passersby probably had no clue as to the lengths park personnel would go to fend off the city’s seemingly unstoppable half-pound enemy.
Maddie Baker, operations manager for the nonprofit Bryant Park Corporation, said during the first Monday morning walk of fall that her staff would “try anything but rat poison” to rid the iconic park of pests. I’m going to try it out,” he told USA TODAY.
This is a question that has vexed mayors and governments for centuries. Baker said park staff is open to anything that works, adding: “We’re always looking at what people are doing in other cities around the world.”
Rats efficiently and relentlessly colonize wherever humans congregate. This is a long-standing problem that experts are trying to attack with a global strategy. About 25 blocks from Bryant Park, other people who make a living worrying about rats recently gathered on the banks of the Hudson River. There, the common urban rat likely first arrived on a ship from the Old World.
The first-ever Lat National Summit was aimed at presenting best practices across North America.
National Urban Mouse Summit
In a small conference room at Google’s newly renovated Pier 57, officials and experts spent two days discussing previously common practices such as extermination, their unintended consequences, and the lack of success in the war on rats. We discussed the reasons. Dr. Ashwin Vasan, the city’s health commissioner, told the story of the 14th century Black Death to health, sanitation and pest control officials and academics from across the United States and Canada.
Mice aren’t the only problem. The plague bacterium, transmitted by fleas and transmitted by rodents, wreaked havoc on the trade routes and port cities of the Old World, decimating humans with plague. Although plague is no longer a problem, the city still grapples with rat-borne diseases such as leptospirosis. Sanitation workers picking up trash on city streets can come into contact with rat urine on trash, potentially infecting people with the bacteria. Leptospirosis thrives in the heat, and global warming has helped New York’s rats take over.
In the 21st century, “rat control is just as important,” Vasan said. It’s not just about disease prevention. “It’s also a sense of freedom: freedom from stress and fear, freedom from a sense of the place you live in” some state of desolation or neglect. โ
Growing city, growing mischief
Dealing with rodent problems is difficult. To get it right, we need to address competing issues such as infrastructure, sanitation, and the biology of rodents, which are complex and adaptive mammals. Reducing rat populations requires knowledge of human behavior and psychology.
Experts predict that by 2050, 70% of the population will live in cities. Basan said cities will then have to deal with aging infrastructure to feed people and increase waste. It is highly likely that rats will follow in the footsteps of humans in the future.
Perhaps no American city is more aware of this dynamic than New York.
“We’re large, diverse, and densely populated, and that trend will continue to grow,” said Caroline Bragdon, head of the New York City Department of Health’s division of veterinary and pest control services. Deaf,โ he told USA. “We need to keep working to address the problems, but we also need to do it in a sustainable way,” he said today during a break from the first day of the summit.
According to an article in The New Yorker, about 80 years ago, rats lurked in the city’s docks and butcher shops, bringing with them the potential for disease. The next most prevalent species was the brown rat or brown rat. It is the only rat currently living in New York City, and likely came to North America just before the American Revolution. While other port cities still have populations of small black rats, or roof rats, also known as brown rats, New York hasn’t seen them for some time, Bragdon explained.
Increased rodent production
Matthew Fry, a pest management expert at Cornell University, said workers have been using poisons to eradicate rat populations for decades. But it can be counterproductive.
Colonies may disappear. But once the new rats inevitably reestablish themselves, they no longer face competition from other colonies, allowing their numbers to thrive.
Fry calls this the “boomerang effect.” Female rats breed four to five times a year and have approximately 8 to 12 pups per litter. Like other mammals, rats have “reproductive synchrony,” meaning that all females in a colony produce offspring at the same time. “Rodents are incredibly prolific,” Frye explained.
This is especially true if food and water are plentiful. If that happens, you’ll end up giving birth to even bigger babies. Prolific breeding often occurs near areas where humans live, leaving behind discarded food and waste.
To address this issue, it’s important to understand food sources and “harbours” – places where rats like to live. For example, brown rats typically burrow in the ground near humans. Mr Fry said human choices about food and waste played a role in this.
“It’s our actions as humans that affect rats, but we don’t often spend enough time trying to change our behaviors to minimize conditions that are attractive to rats.” he told USA TODAY. “People may not initially understand how their actions are affecting rats.”
It’s important for communities to consider inequalities, he added. Plans need to take into account those who don’t have the resources to deal with rats or who think the problem is beyond their control.
Claudia Riegel, director of the New Orleans Mosquito, Termite and Rodent Control Commission, called the study a “wicked problem” with urban rats in a presentation at the conference. Riegel and his colleagues also had the opportunity to compare notes with rat experts in Seattle, Boston, Washington, D.C., and British Columbia, Canada.
Unlike New York, New Orleans faces a harmful rat situation because it is not only chasing brown rats, but black rats as well. Each location requires an individualized plan to address its unique rodent problem.
“It’s impossible to get rid of all the rats in the city,” she says. “If you have a structure or a building, it’s absolutely possible to eliminate rodents from that structure. First and foremost, it’s about putting it in perspective.”
‘The drug dealers have left’ but the rats remain in the park
Back at Bryant Park, home to the New York Public Library and two giant stone lions, tourists and employees huddled under umbrellas and trees in the intermittent rain. The Empire State Building towered over nearby buildings, mirroring the buildings facing it.
In the 1980s, Bryant Park was known for its drug market and violent crime. “The smell of urine was everywhere, and there were no public restrooms. No one visited,” said Dan Biedermann, longtime director of the nonprofit Bryant Park, which reopened the space in 1992. Ta.
Since then, the space has been transformed by new ownership and donations to help cover the costs of keeping it clean. Like other parts of New York City, crime has decreased significantly. Many flowers are blooming now. There are concerts, exercise classes, cafes and restaurants.
“The drug dealers left, so we kicked them out,” Biedermann said. โThe only thing that was still a problem was the rats.โ
The park used the funds to tackle this thorny problem. When Mayor Eric Adams takes office in 2022, he becomes yet another Big Apple mayor who has declared war on city rats.
Adams, who is currently facing federal corruption charges, appointed a rat czar in 2023 and worked across multiple agencies, coordinating the work of pest control companies and property managers. The city led an effort to “containerize” trash, as most trash is left on the streets overnight and placed in plastic bags for collection by garbage trucks. Rats are nocturnal, so they are the perfect environment for a feast.
The city carried out rat extermination in areas known to have high “rat activity.” In July, the city formed a volunteer “Rat Pack” to support Adams’ rat eradication efforts. The training included projects such as a “rat academy,” where participants learned prevention techniques, a “rat walk” around the city, and a cleanup of a local park.
Adams’ efforts often included canned jokes about Mickey Mouse at press conferences and declarations that “rats don’t rule our cities.” But he also said it’s a problem that haunts the psyche of New Yorkers who, for example, wake up when there’s a rat in the bathroom.
“I don’t think any mayor in history has ever publicly said how much they hate rats,” Adams told summit attendees.
Early data on Adams’ efforts look promising. Calls to 311 due to rat sightings are down, down 6.3% since the rat czar was appointed, and by almost 14% in the city’s mitigation zones, the city proudly said in a news release announcing the rat summit. Ta.
White Flag โThunder God Vine Plantโ
Baker took a job at Bryant Park around the time that Adams started working out. Biedermann named her director of pest management. Her closest contact with rodents was with two pet rats she had as a child.
She began researching the latest strategies. As he strolled around the park, Baker pointed to several examples of what has worked. Following the New Zealand model, the park uses corrugated plastic covered in peanut butter. If a rat bites it, the staff can track the rat’s movements. White flags were hung above the vines to mark the spot where pest control workers had sprayed the rat burrows with carbon monoxide, causing them to collapse. In one quadrant of the park, the researchers placed female rats on contraceptive measures. Their test method included soft baits consisting of peanut butter, oats, and plant-based compounds found in Raijin vine.
Initially, the team discovered more than 70 burrows each week. Currently, there are only about five burrows in the park. Baker stressed that this is “anecdotal,” but it can take days or even weeks for staff to see a mouse. She needed more evidence before she could say they went that far.
Bryant Park is, in many ways, a model for the city that reached out to the top of the first mouse. However, Bryant Park is privately owned by a nonprofit organization. It’s unclear whether other less profitable parks, let alone smaller cities, can replicate that success. Biedermann and Baker say buy-in is important.
Franรงois Roulin, a 92-year-old retired bartender from Queens, recalled on the gravel of the park’s petanque court the last time he saw the mouse near the park’s public restrooms more than a month ago. .
Lelan has volunteered at Bryant Park for 15 years, teaching pรฉtanque, a game similar to bocce ball from her native France.
Monday was the last week that petanque instructors will be off until April. The games and park helped people relax in the middle of the city, Lelan said.
โForget about business,โ he said, picking up a pรฉtanque ball with a magnet on a string. “it’s good.”
Around lunch time, a group of regular players arrived, some in suits, others in Seattle Seahawks jerseys. Leelan watched, observing their match. There is nothing to distract or dissuade them. And no pranks in sight.