![]() Gradually, the city dug out more and more sewers, more and more various pipes, more subways and other tunnels. There are old, buried tunnels, rooms, chambers, now not accessible to humans but perfectly accessible to rats. New buildings were built on top of the old ones. Estimates vary wildly, to as high as 32 million. The rest is history.Īnyway, back to rat population. Two decades later I joined the Underwood lab. The new faculty's name was Herbert Underwood. So they hired this bright, young lad from Texas in his spot - two Science papers already published and he took only 3.5 years to get both MS and PhD. Although the field was still very young, Davis' work made the rest of the department aware of it (they did not think it was Biorrhythms silliness, as many assumed at the time), so they were interested in hiring a replacement who was doing something similar. While on the ship, rats kept EST time, but quickly re-entrained to the Australian local time once they arrived there and were exposed to ambient light. David sent some woodchucks on a ship from Philadelphia to Australia. He used to work with Curt Richter before, at Johns Hopkins, and Curt is one of the pioneers of chronobiology. At the time he was ready to retire, in the 1970s, he was actively working on daily and seasonal rhythms in various animals. For a while he was a professor in the Department of Zoology at NCSU, that is, in my own department. Not even close to 8 million.Īn aside - I have an indirect personal connection to Davis. In 1949, Dave Davis did a systematic study of rats, by trapping and capturing them, and estimated that rat population in New York City was only about 250,000. ![]() And it has been repeated for more than a century, by media, by scientists, by United Nations, by pest control companies, by health departments, and apparently everyone else. Completely coincidentally, England in 1909 also had a population of 40 million people. From that, he estimated the total population of rats on agricultural land to be about 40 million. At that time, there were 40 million cultivated acres in England. From that informal survey, Boelter came up with an average of one rat per acre (yes, of agricultural land). He asked farmers (but never bothered to look in the cities) to estimate how many rats they have in their fields. It started in 1909 when W.R.Boelter published a study of rats in England. Nobody seems to even be attempting to estimate.īeware of the myth that there is one rat per person. But things we really need to know, we don't - information is just not available (and some of it never will be). But we can speculate using the information and knowledge we have in our possession. The complicated question, how many drowned and how many survived, is probably impossible to answer. The short answer is: some rats drowned, some survived. See, for example, articles in Huffington Post Green, Forbes, National Geographic, Business Insider, Mother Nature Network and NYMag. ![]() How many of the NYC rats survived hurricane Sandy? This question has been asked in the wake of Sandy's flooding of lower and east Manhattan. ![]()
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