Trent researcher working on new way to limit rat populations

Newly published research from Trent University is providing an insight on how to control the growing population of rats in urban spaces.

The research aims to assist in alleviating the billions of dollars annually spent to avoid destruction at the paws of the pests.

Eric Guiry, a Banting postdoctoral fellow in the anthropology department at Trent, suggests that one way to reduce the rat population is to reduce their habitat quality.

This would include reducing their access to high quality, high protein foods.

“Our research shows that part of the reason that rats are so successful at exploiting urban city environments is because they can access a steadier, higher-quality diet, including much more meat than their counterparts in rural areas,” Guiry stated.

Rats are expected to become more of a pest in coming years, as global warming and expansion of urban areas become bigger issues. The problem with figuring out how to control this is that rats, in cities, are hard to study.

Guiry states he has been able to get around this issue, though. By using archeological materials, he has been able to examine the chemical signatures on the bones of rats to reconstruct the kinds of foods they were eating. This will let him also compare what today’s rats are eating to what they used to eat.

This method will let scientists observe how rat diets vary over urban landscapes, and how they’ve changed over the past hundred years.

The ability to study this will help biologists and pest-control experts in designing better methods of pest control.