
New York's Uptown Rats Are Genetically Distinct from Downtown Rats - tooba
https://www.citylab.com/environment/2017/11/new-york-city-has-genetically-distinct-uptown-and-downtown-rats/547088/
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astrodust
> Rats, although abundant, are not easily fooled into traps. They’re wary of
> new objects. To entice them, the bait was a potent combination of peanut
> butter, bacon, and oats.

They pulled out the big guns. Bacon!

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Unless they plant to study them alive or release them when done (ha!) they
could have just shot them. It would have been a far better use of everyone's
time (and the money of whoever paid for the research) and allowed a more
accurate sample of the rat populations as opposed to a sample of the rats that
like bacon and don't hate new objects quite so much (the difference in samples
is probably negligible but it's still something that must be accounted for).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat-shot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat-
shot)

~~~
astrodust
I don't think the police would appreciate it if you started firing off guns in
the middle of the city. It would be a far better use of everyone's time and
money to just set traps. Are you thinking people would pitch tents and wait
for rats to show up so they could shoot them? That seems harder than setting
traps and checking in a day later.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>I don't think the police would appreciate it if you started firing off guns
in the middle of the city.

We're talking on the order of a hammer on steel here.

I was under the impression. trapping was happening indoors. Go somewhere you
know there will be rats, pop a few, toss them in a bucket, wash rinse repeat.
Depending on who the research is being done under it would only take a call to
whatever department (probably something having to do with trash) you want the
undergrads to tag along with for a shift to collect rats.

>That seems harder than setting traps and checking in a day later.

Going to where you know rats will be once to shoot them is easier than going
twice to set and retrieve traps.

~~~
astrodust
Rats aren't just sitting around waiting to be shot. They're very cautious and
often hard to spot.

Where you can see them scurrying about there's often lots of people and other
distractions, equipment or other obstacles that would make shooting them
impractical.

I don't think the NYC subway crew would take too kindly to people shooting up
their equipment to get rats.

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alexozer
A few weeks ago there was a post about Crowded Cities, a startup trying to
train crows to pick up and throw away cigarette butts in the city for a food
reward. I'm sure it'd be harder, but could crows also be incentivized to
somehow pick up rats?

[http://www.crowdedcities.com/](http://www.crowdedcities.com/)

~~~
exolymph
It would be amazing if they could get the crows to collaborate, e.g. two crows
carrying away a rat. Probably impractical but I love the idea.

~~~
yeldarb
They'd have to have it on a line.

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meggar
Isn’t there a Billy Joel song about this?

~~~
joshuaheard
That song popped into my head when I read the headline!

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Danihan
_Uptown mammal..._

~~~
CodeCube
If only this article were about squirrels :P

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nasredin
No mention of the infamous Pizza Rat, the unofficial mascot of NYC?

Or the Avocado Rat - Pizza Rat's hip cousin living in Williamsburg?

~~~
starshadowx2
Pizza Rat is mentioned in the first paragraph, with a link to a Buzzfeed
article on it.

"New York City is a place where rats climb out of toilets, bite babies in
their cribs, crawl on sleeping commuters, take over a Taco Bell restaurant,
and ___drag an entire slice of pizza down the subway stairs._ __"

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pavel_lishin
I wonder if this is true for other city species. Are there distinct raccoon
populations? What about birds and cockroaches?

~~~
greeneggs
Before considering rats, this research group started by looking at white-
footed mice. [1]

> The mice have become so genetically distinct from one another that if you
> show Munshi-South a DNA sequence randomly selected from a white-footed mouse
> in NYC, he can tell you where it lives. At the same time, city mice as a
> whole also seem to be evolving new traits that mice from rural areas outside
> the city lack…

[1] [http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/uptown-mice-
are...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/uptown-mice-are-
different-from-downtown-mice.html)

This is an older article, from when their first studies were coming out.

[2]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26evolve.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26evolve.html)

Both articles also discuss other species, but it seems like the focus is
usually on genetic differences between urban and rural populations, or
polluted versus not polluted, and not on intra-urban genetic variations.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Your quote stopped right where I started to get interested, so for the benefit
of others:

> _At the same time, city mice as a whole also seem to be evolving new traits
> that mice from rural areas outside the city lack: genetic mutations that may
> help them neutralize toxic metals in polluted soil, for example, or speed up
> their sperm in response to the intense sexual competition in their
> overcrowded metropolitan homes._

I wonder why they seem to be a little hedgy around the toxic-metal-mutation
bit. I'm guessing they suspect that that's what the mutation does, but don't
particularly want to feed the poor mice toxic-metal laden soil just to
confirm.

~~~
astrodust
Some populations of city mice are ridiculously hardy. They can eat warfarin-
laced poison food like it's candy.

It's like the roaches in some Washington D.C. buildings that are immune to
virtually every chemical used for pest control. It's so bad that chemical
companies test new compounds on those populations first. That's what decades
of selective breeding has brought about.

~~~
serf
> They can eat warfarin-laced poison food like it's candy.

question : where does such food come from, and why?

~~~
astrodust
It's a common rat/mouse poison. Cheap to manufacture.

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gadders
I guess a similar thing will happen with the various Orca ecotypes, given that
they don't inter-breed: [http://uk.whales.org/wdc-in-action/meet-different-
types-of-o...](http://uk.whales.org/wdc-in-action/meet-different-types-of-
orca)

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pc2g4d
Maybe they should compare the city mouse and the country mouse next.

~~~
ep103
That's actually linked in some of these comments. Yup, there are some
differences there too : )

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fblp
Can mods update this to link to the original article?
[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/rats-
of-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/rats-of-new-
york/546959/)

I doubt The Atlantic would have given citylab permission to republish it like
this.

~~~
vwcx
The Atlantic and citylab are the same company. Of course they are cross-
posting.

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lalp1
Not rats but humans, very interesting : [https://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-
Inheritance-Genes-Human-H...](https://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-
Genes-Human-
History/dp/0143127160/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512152139&sr=8-1&keywords=troublesome+inheritance)

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pvaldes
Is a matter of time that we'll start seeing rat hair as proof in the trials.

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sigmaprimus
This article made me laugh, I can't help but wonder if this is some kind of
fake news story to promote a class based agenda. I guess it could be true but
it seems very odd that these rats traveled all the way from Europe, made their
way into the city from the docks, yet somehow decided to stay put for half a
millennia once choosing a Manhattan burrough.

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gumby
The article doesn't say anything like that at all. The rat "neighborhoods" do
overlap, but not densely (think of the islands of wooded areas in a ski
resort). In such a case it's not unreasonable to see speciation. (which is not
described in this article, thus implying continued interbreeding.)

You don't need a lot of territory for this to happen. The lice that specialize
in humans have split into two distinct species: one for head hair and one for
pubic hair. (and allegedly the latter is under threat).

~~~
stan_rogers
Human lice haven't split into two distinct species; the "human" lice - the
ones that have been with us for as long as we've been around - are now head
lice, and we picked up pubic lice from gorillas after we "lost" most of our
body hair. (It's still there, of course, but not in a way that's useful to
lice.)

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saalweachter
> we picked up pubic lice from gorillas after we "lost" most of our body hair

Can we, uhh, not mention this to any alien species we may encounter in the
future?

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bdamm
We should present it early in hopes that they never go out of quarantine.

