Most New York animals stay close to home. Yes, itinerant coyotes will traverse the parks by night, and raccoons might travel half a mile in search of better trash, skunks a little less. But feral cats won’t stray three blocks beyond where they were born, and few mice will venture more than a hundred feet from their burrows in a lifetime. Rats seldom stray far from home, either. But they get where they’re going more easily than other New York animals, because they are more like us. The city suits them.

“With rats, the map is almost three-dimensional: the surface, the buildings, everything underneath,” Jason Munshi-South told me. Earth Science 13th Edition By Tarbuck And Lutgens Introduction on this page. We were rat-spotting in Lower Manhattan, and Munshi-South, an urban ecologist who is an associate professor at Fordham, was explaining what he’d discovered after studying New York rats, also known as Norway rats or brown rats, for three years. Lo 1 1b Flaming Cliffs Set Up Email Account on this page.

The popular and informational television station Animal Planet has named New York City the worst city for rats in the world. In this case, they are not referring to. Sep 23, 2015 Metro: A huge rat feeds on garbage inside the garbage storage room at Jamaica Center Parsons Boulevard subway station located at the corner of Parsons Boulevard and Archer Avenue in Jamaica, New York on Tuesday, August 23, 2011.

They cannot, as legend has it, collapse their skeletons to fit through cracks, nor are they especially bold; indeed, they’re “neophobic,” which means they won’t touch a new object, even unfamiliar food, for at least two days and sometimes as long as a week. They nearly always follow the same routes to their food sources. They sleep, on and off, for about 10 hours a day, and the rest of the time they travel in tight, well-worn paths. Munshi-South’s back-of-the-envelope estimate is that they take at least 2,800 steps a day, compared with the average American human’s 5,000 or so.

Rats live in colonies of 40 or 50 and sometimes relocate to new homes, but over the course of their one-year life span they rarely walk more than 600 feet from their birthplace. When they do, they seem to move north and south, with the subways, but, Munshi-South emphasized, no one is sure exactly how they do it. “We don’t even know if they move between stations, under- or above-ground,” he said. “That’s something we hope to figure out.” We walked north from City Hall Park into the southern edge of Chinatown. Munshi-South was confident we’d see some rat activity, even on this bright, crisp morning. In the city, rats hug structural edges (“feeling” the walls with whiskers), and their routes are marked by sebum, oil from their hair that rubs off and darkens the concrete landscape. Pay attention, and you’ll see these lines on walls, an inch or so above the sidewalk, sometimes smattered with little clumps of fur.

Rats build their colonies wherever they can burrow: in dirt, certainly, but really anywhere crumbly and close to constant food, usually in the form of trash, which is more or less everywhere. (A few pockets of the Upper East Side are free of large permanent rat colonies, but that’s about it.) Every few minutes, Munshi-South pointed to a lumpy mound, usually under a bush or near a trash can, pocked by silver-dollar-size holes. Rats tend to use just one entry and exit, but they like to build extra escape routes just in case. Advertisement “This is insane,” Munshi-South said.