RAT KING CAUGHT ON VIDEO
Russian farmer makes a rare find and uploads footage to Instagram
While “squirrel kings” have been reported on a number of occasions in recent years (see FT300:14, 355:25, 373:9, 383:9), with the most recent one, involving seven baby squirrels in Grand Blanc, Michigan, in October, true rat kings – balls of rats with their tails knotted together – seem to be much rarer. Only around 30 rat kings have been recorded in the last 500 years as compared to 17 squirrel kings in the US alone since 1989. The last rat king on record was found in Estonia in 2005 and consisted of 16 rats, nine of which were still alive; they were found in a shed in Saru with their tails tangled in a ball of frozen sand. It is now preserved in the Natural History Museum in Tartu (see FT383:9). Now, another has turned up, found by farmer Alibulat Rasulov while surveying flooding in his fields near Stavropol in southwest Russia, with its discovery documented by two videos posted on Instagram.
The first video shows a drainage ditch across a flat, flooded, field and is about three minutes long. As Rasulov pans across the flood damage he spots something wriggling in the vegetation at the edge of the channel and zooms in on it. He pushes the vegetation aside revealing two flooded holes that look like rodent burrows, and just outside them a clump of five soaking wet juvenile rats with their tails knotted together and twined in the vegetation. Picking up the rats, he frees them from the plants and places them on dry land, but while they scrabble to escape, they are thwarted by their inextricably knotted tails. In the second video, around 30 seconds long, Rasulov has placed the rats on a white background and goes about disentangling their tails, which he does successfully, allowing all five rats to scamper to freedom. This is the first film of a live rat king, and the first of one’s discovery, which goes some way to dispelling the persistent suspicion that previous specimens have been hoaxed, although some might question the coincidence of their discovery taking place on film.
The location of their discovery also marks this rat king out as unusual. It was discovered in open ground next to what looks like rat burrows, rather than in buildings. That suggests these are brown rats ( Rattus norvegicus), which burrow and will live in open country, and not black rats ( Rattus rattus), which do not burrow and live in trees or buildings. Although the rats in this king look black, it is not possible to identify the species by colour alone; there are black rats that are light brown and brown rats that are almost black. Previous rat kings, where the species has been mentioned, have all consisted of black rats and been found in buildings, not open country. That may be because their presence in buildings makes it more likely that people will find them, while kings among brown rats in outdoor burrows would be much less likely to be discovered. It is also an outlier when it comes to location; by far the majority of rat kings come from northern Europe, mostly Germany and neighbouring countries, although Java and New Zealand claim one each. Livescience.com, 20 Sept; mlive. com, 2 Oct 2021.