Rat

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A Black rat (Rattus Rattus)
A Black rat (Rattus Rattus)

The rat is a small mammal. It is a rodent. Rats are omnivores, they eat anything they find that remotely looks like food. All rats are in the genus Rattus. There are about 56 different species of rats.

The best known rats are the Black rat (Rattus rattus), and the Brown rat (R. norvegicus). These two are known as Old World Rats. The group has its origins in Asia. Most rats are much bigger than their close relatives, the Old World mice. In the wild they very rarely weigh more than 500 grams though.

Rats seem to be quite intelligent animals. They are also very sociable. Rats are usually very clean animals.

Some people keep rats as a pet. They are called fancy rats.

Rats usually live for 2 to 5 years, 3 years on average.

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[edit] Rats that are not rats

Other mammals are called rat by many people, but those are not true rats, many are unrelated to the true Old World rat. Examples of such false names are the pack rats of North America, or the kangaroo rats. Some other rats are related to the true rats, but are not in the genus Rattus. Such an example is the Bandicoot rat. Such problem cases are very few in number. Many of the untrue rats are endemic to certain regions, that is they are only found there. Very often, they live on islands. In many cases, these species are also endangered of disappearing. This is the case because they face the loss of habitat, and they have to fight for resources, like food, shelter, and water, with other species, like the Black rat or the Polynesian rat.

[edit] Where to find rats

Rats are opportunists. If they have the choice between a food that will need a fight to get, and another food that will not, they take the food that does not need a fight. For this reason, rats have lived close to humans for a long time. Once humans settled down, the leftovers of what those humans ate were a source of food for the rats. So the rats followed.

Rats are present in almost all settlements. In cities, the often live in the sewers.

[edit] Rats as carriers of disease

Many scientiests believe that the Bubonic plague was spread through fleas on rats. That form of plague is spread by the microorganism (or germ) Yersina pestis, which lives on rat fleas. These fleas preyed on rats (Rattus ratus). Those rats lived in the European cities of the day. The rats themselves died of the plague. Some scientists believe that the plague spread faster than the rats. Therefore, the rats cannot be the prime carrier. More research is needed. People believe this disease was the Black Death. It killed nearly a third of the population of Europe, in many epidemics in the Middle Ages.

Rats can carry diseases. Many times, rats living in poor conditions have problems with parasites themselves. Few of those diseases can spread to humans though. One of those is called Leptospirosis, another one is the plague.

[edit] Pictures of rats

[edit] External links

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Look up Rattus in Wikispecies, a directory of species