Fragments of 700-year-old DNA from the bug responsible for the Black Death have been pulled from the teeth of four plague victims buried in east London.
Scientists used the degraded strands to reconstruct the entire genetic code of the deadly bacterium - the first time experts have succeeded in drafting the genome of an ancient pathogen, or disease-causing agent.
The researchers found that a specific strain of the plague bug Yersinia pestis caused the pandemic that killed 100 million Europeans - between 30% and 50% of the total population - in just five years between 1347 and 1351.
They also learned that the strain is the "mother" of all modern bubonic plague bacteria.
"Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague," said lead scientist Dr Hendrik Poinar, from McMaster University in Canada. "With a better understanding of the evolution of this deadly pathogen, we are entering a new era of research into infectious disease."
Although rare, bubonic plague continues to kill some 2,000 people around the world each year.
The scientists, reporting their findings in the journal Nature, analysed the skeletal remains of four individuals exhumed from an East Smithfield "plague pit" sited under what is now the Royal Mint in London.
Tiny scraps of Yersinia pestis DNA were obtained from the victims' dental pulp, and from these fragments, the researchers were able to reconstruct virtually the whole of the bug's genetic code, or genome.
The same techniques could now be used to study the genomes of other ancient pathogens, say experts.
"This will provide us with direct insights into the evolution of human pathogens and historical pandemics," said co-author Dr Johannes Krause, from the University of Tubingen in Germany.
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=4348728589329576621
Showing posts with label plague. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plague. Show all posts
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Attack of the rats
The local farmers call it a flood; an inundation that happens every 50 years.
Others believe it to be an act of God, an inevitability.
It isn't water flooding the precious farmland in north-eastern India, but rats.
A once in a generation, gigantic plague of rats, that ruins crops and leaves people starving.
A rat army so big, so mythical, that until now some scientists did not believe it was real.
This explosion in the rodent population, leading to swarms of hungry pests, is caused by a glut in the food supply, namely bamboo seeds, researchers have confirmed.
And it is a perfect example of how the simple relationship between two apparently innocuous species, a tall grass and a tiny rodent, can turn the ecology of a whole region upside down: wiping out wildlife, destroying agriculture and leaving people destitute.
Worse, scientists suspect that climate change may create even bigger rat armies in the future.
Bamboo carpet
Bamboo forest covers more than 26,000 square kilometres throughout the north-eastern state of Mizoram, extending into the Chin Hills of Burma and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.
This species of bamboo (Melcocanna baccifera) is invaluable for farmers whose entire livelihood is based on what they can grow.
It provides a building material, clothing and even food - in the form of bamboo shoots.
Ecologically though, it is an aggressive plant that has annihilated its competition, and carpeted the area.
Approximately every 50 years, though, that carpet of forest dies off.
Whatever the environmental conditions, an internal clock signals to each plant that it is time to flower, set seed and die.
"It's a way for the bamboo to ensure that the seeds survive," explains Steve Belmain, an ecologist from Greenwich University in London.
"But when the bamboo seed falls - you end up with 80 tonnes of seed per hectare on the ground.
"That's 80 tonnes of food just lying there waiting to be eaten."
For Dr Belmain and his colleagues, the most recent bamboo flowering, which began in 2004 and will continue to 2011, provided a unique opportunity to study an event that only occurs every half century.
"Before this, all we had was anecdotes from 50 years ago," he told BBC News.
"It had become a legend - many people who live in the area now weren't alive during the last outbreak."
'Rat armies'
It is only now that scientists have accepted that the "bamboo masting" is the trigger for the outbreaks.
The infrequency and scale of the event rendered it somewhat mythical.
"The many fantastic stories make it much harder for scientists to take it seriously and separate fact from fiction," says Dr Belmain.
When his colleagues interviewed the communities in the Hill Tracts, some people talked about "rat armies" that appear to work together.
And many believed the rat plagues to be an act of God.
The big problem for local farmers is that their low-growing rice crops make easy pickings for the voracious pests.
Dr Belmain says that, when the rats come, some people simply do not bother planting crops. They just accept that it is pointless.
He and his colleague Grant Singleton from the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, Philippines, have just compiled and edited a new book, Rodent outbreaks - Ecology and impacts.
The book brings together the findings of teams of scientists working in the region, studying the local ecology and agricultural practices.
On top of widespread starvation, Dr Singleton tells BBC News, that the rat floods turn the whole forest ecology "upside down".
"There is a huge impact on insects and other wildlife too - habitats and food are simply wiped out," he says.
Pest apathy
But, despite the fact that the locals see their crops ravaged, there is little to no drive to do anything about it.
The scientists say there is an overwhelming feeling of apathy in the region.
And in the lowlands of Burma, cyclone Nargis - an event that itself killed an estimated 140,000 people - actually made the problem even worse.
Dr Singleton explains: "Because the cyclone was so intense and so much life was lost, there were a lot of areas abandoned that would normally be cropped.
"And these areas became overgrown with grasses and weeds that were a major breeding ground for the rodents.
"Also smallholder farmers recovered from the cyclone at different stages, leading to the crops being planted at markedly different times.
"Therefore the rice crops matured at different times and provided food on the table of the rat for much longer than usual."
All of this led to the rats breeding for longer and to their young maturing and breeding before the cropping season ended. The result: another explosion in the rat population.
There was anecdotal evidence that the cyclone also wiped out predators, including snakes, that would otherwise have preyed on the rats.
This, along with abandoned land and fewer humans to catch the rodents, left them with little control over their numbers.
Between June and September 2009, community rat collection campaigns conducted in just a few townships in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta collected more than 2.6 million rats.
Dr Belmain says the huge number of rodents was related to the cyclone.
"Outbreaks of this magnitude have not been recorded in the previous 30 years in this delta," he tells BBC News.
The scientists believe that outbreaks of rodent and other crop pest populations following extreme weather events [are] likely to become more common with the onset of climate change.
Unusual pests
Not just one rodent species involved, but one of the main culprits in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta is Bandicota savilei.
This common rat is a native species, rather than an invasive predator that has found itself in a new environment with no strong competition.
It seems though that the ecological landscape is so warped by the bamboo masting that this has become a native species gone bad.
The rats can produce a litter every three weeks and the baby rats reach sexual maturity in just 50-60 days.
For the scientists, it is a frustrating problem, because the solutions are relatively straightforward.
Dr Belmain says: "Most of the methods used for pest control are not working at all."
"In India, individual farmers often buy a handful of poison at the market and spread it around."
One solution could be a simple plastic sheeting fence - containing holes that lead into rat traps.
So Dr Belmain and his colleagues hope to reach local farmers and teach them that by laying efficient traps at the right times, they could reduce the amount of food they lose.
Dr Belmain says: They're either engrained in apathy because they've tried and failed to control it or they don't appreciate how much they're losing to rats.
"So you really have to hold their hands and show them their lives can be better.
"People can do a lot more if they're organised."
Preparation, it seems, will be key to facing the next rat army.
Hear more about the rat floods from Steve Belmain in an interview with Science in Action on the BBC World Service
By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9198000/9198744.stm
Others believe it to be an act of God, an inevitability.
It isn't water flooding the precious farmland in north-eastern India, but rats.
A once in a generation, gigantic plague of rats, that ruins crops and leaves people starving.
A rat army so big, so mythical, that until now some scientists did not believe it was real.
This explosion in the rodent population, leading to swarms of hungry pests, is caused by a glut in the food supply, namely bamboo seeds, researchers have confirmed.
And it is a perfect example of how the simple relationship between two apparently innocuous species, a tall grass and a tiny rodent, can turn the ecology of a whole region upside down: wiping out wildlife, destroying agriculture and leaving people destitute.
Worse, scientists suspect that climate change may create even bigger rat armies in the future.
Bamboo carpet
Bamboo forest covers more than 26,000 square kilometres throughout the north-eastern state of Mizoram, extending into the Chin Hills of Burma and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.
This species of bamboo (Melcocanna baccifera) is invaluable for farmers whose entire livelihood is based on what they can grow.
It provides a building material, clothing and even food - in the form of bamboo shoots.
Ecologically though, it is an aggressive plant that has annihilated its competition, and carpeted the area.
Approximately every 50 years, though, that carpet of forest dies off.
Whatever the environmental conditions, an internal clock signals to each plant that it is time to flower, set seed and die.
"It's a way for the bamboo to ensure that the seeds survive," explains Steve Belmain, an ecologist from Greenwich University in London.
"But when the bamboo seed falls - you end up with 80 tonnes of seed per hectare on the ground.
"That's 80 tonnes of food just lying there waiting to be eaten."
For Dr Belmain and his colleagues, the most recent bamboo flowering, which began in 2004 and will continue to 2011, provided a unique opportunity to study an event that only occurs every half century.
"Before this, all we had was anecdotes from 50 years ago," he told BBC News.
"It had become a legend - many people who live in the area now weren't alive during the last outbreak."
'Rat armies'
It is only now that scientists have accepted that the "bamboo masting" is the trigger for the outbreaks.
The infrequency and scale of the event rendered it somewhat mythical.
"The many fantastic stories make it much harder for scientists to take it seriously and separate fact from fiction," says Dr Belmain.
When his colleagues interviewed the communities in the Hill Tracts, some people talked about "rat armies" that appear to work together.
And many believed the rat plagues to be an act of God.
The big problem for local farmers is that their low-growing rice crops make easy pickings for the voracious pests.
Dr Belmain says that, when the rats come, some people simply do not bother planting crops. They just accept that it is pointless.
He and his colleague Grant Singleton from the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, Philippines, have just compiled and edited a new book, Rodent outbreaks - Ecology and impacts.
The book brings together the findings of teams of scientists working in the region, studying the local ecology and agricultural practices.
On top of widespread starvation, Dr Singleton tells BBC News, that the rat floods turn the whole forest ecology "upside down".
"There is a huge impact on insects and other wildlife too - habitats and food are simply wiped out," he says.
Pest apathy
But, despite the fact that the locals see their crops ravaged, there is little to no drive to do anything about it.
The scientists say there is an overwhelming feeling of apathy in the region.
And in the lowlands of Burma, cyclone Nargis - an event that itself killed an estimated 140,000 people - actually made the problem even worse.
Dr Singleton explains: "Because the cyclone was so intense and so much life was lost, there were a lot of areas abandoned that would normally be cropped.
"And these areas became overgrown with grasses and weeds that were a major breeding ground for the rodents.
"Also smallholder farmers recovered from the cyclone at different stages, leading to the crops being planted at markedly different times.
"Therefore the rice crops matured at different times and provided food on the table of the rat for much longer than usual."
All of this led to the rats breeding for longer and to their young maturing and breeding before the cropping season ended. The result: another explosion in the rat population.
There was anecdotal evidence that the cyclone also wiped out predators, including snakes, that would otherwise have preyed on the rats.
This, along with abandoned land and fewer humans to catch the rodents, left them with little control over their numbers.
Between June and September 2009, community rat collection campaigns conducted in just a few townships in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta collected more than 2.6 million rats.
Dr Belmain says the huge number of rodents was related to the cyclone.
"Outbreaks of this magnitude have not been recorded in the previous 30 years in this delta," he tells BBC News.
The scientists believe that outbreaks of rodent and other crop pest populations following extreme weather events [are] likely to become more common with the onset of climate change.
Unusual pests
Not just one rodent species involved, but one of the main culprits in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta is Bandicota savilei.
This common rat is a native species, rather than an invasive predator that has found itself in a new environment with no strong competition.
It seems though that the ecological landscape is so warped by the bamboo masting that this has become a native species gone bad.
The rats can produce a litter every three weeks and the baby rats reach sexual maturity in just 50-60 days.
For the scientists, it is a frustrating problem, because the solutions are relatively straightforward.
Dr Belmain says: "Most of the methods used for pest control are not working at all."
"In India, individual farmers often buy a handful of poison at the market and spread it around."
One solution could be a simple plastic sheeting fence - containing holes that lead into rat traps.
So Dr Belmain and his colleagues hope to reach local farmers and teach them that by laying efficient traps at the right times, they could reduce the amount of food they lose.
Dr Belmain says: They're either engrained in apathy because they've tried and failed to control it or they don't appreciate how much they're losing to rats.
"So you really have to hold their hands and show them their lives can be better.
"People can do a lot more if they're organised."
Preparation, it seems, will be key to facing the next rat army.
Hear more about the rat floods from Steve Belmain in an interview with Science in Action on the BBC World Service
By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9198000/9198744.stm
Attack of the rats
The local farmers call it a flood; an inundation that happens every 50 years.
Others believe it to be an act of God, an inevitability.
It isn't water flooding the precious farmland in north-eastern India, but rats.
A once in a generation, gigantic plague of rats, that ruins crops and leaves people starving.
A rat army so big, so mythical, that until now some scientists did not believe it was real.
This explosion in the rodent population, leading to swarms of hungry pests, is caused by a glut in the food supply, namely bamboo seeds, researchers have confirmed.
And it is a perfect example of how the simple relationship between two apparently innocuous species, a tall grass and a tiny rodent, can turn the ecology of a whole region upside down: wiping out wildlife, destroying agriculture and leaving people destitute.
Worse, scientists suspect that climate change may create even bigger rat armies in the future.
Bamboo carpet
Bamboo forest covers more than 26,000 square kilometres throughout the north-eastern state of Mizoram, extending into the Chin Hills of Burma and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.
This species of bamboo (Melcocanna baccifera) is invaluable for farmers whose entire livelihood is based on what they can grow.
It provides a building material, clothing and even food - in the form of bamboo shoots.
Ecologically though, it is an aggressive plant that has annihilated its competition, and carpeted the area.
Approximately every 50 years, though, that carpet of forest dies off.
Whatever the environmental conditions, an internal clock signals to each plant that it is time to flower, set seed and die.
"It's a way for the bamboo to ensure that the seeds survive," explains Steve Belmain, an ecologist from Greenwich University in London.
"But when the bamboo seed falls - you end up with 80 tonnes of seed per hectare on the ground.
"That's 80 tonnes of food just lying there waiting to be eaten."
For Dr Belmain and his colleagues, the most recent bamboo flowering, which began in 2004 and will continue to 2011, provided a unique opportunity to study an event that only occurs every half century.
"Before this, all we had was anecdotes from 50 years ago," he told BBC News.
"It had become a legend - many people who live in the area now weren't alive during the last outbreak."
'Rat armies'
It is only now that scientists have accepted that the "bamboo masting" is the trigger for the outbreaks.
The infrequency and scale of the event rendered it somewhat mythical.
"The many fantastic stories make it much harder for scientists to take it seriously and separate fact from fiction," says Dr Belmain.
When his colleagues interviewed the communities in the Hill Tracts, some people talked about "rat armies" that appear to work together.
And many believed the rat plagues to be an act of God.
The big problem for local farmers is that their low-growing rice crops make easy pickings for the voracious pests.
Dr Belmain says that, when the rats come, some people simply do not bother planting crops. They just accept that it is pointless.
He and his colleague Grant Singleton from the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, Philippines, have just compiled and edited a new book, Rodent outbreaks - Ecology and impacts.
The book brings together the findings of teams of scientists working in the region, studying the local ecology and agricultural practices.
On top of widespread starvation, Dr Singleton tells BBC News, that the rat floods turn the whole forest ecology "upside down".
"There is a huge impact on insects and other wildlife too - habitats and food are simply wiped out," he says.
Pest apathy
But, despite the fact that the locals see their crops ravaged, there is little to no drive to do anything about it.
The scientists say there is an overwhelming feeling of apathy in the region.
And in the lowlands of Burma, cyclone Nargis - an event that itself killed an estimated 140,000 people - actually made the problem even worse.
Dr Singleton explains: "Because the cyclone was so intense and so much life was lost, there were a lot of areas abandoned that would normally be cropped.
"And these areas became overgrown with grasses and weeds that were a major breeding ground for the rodents.
"Also smallholder farmers recovered from the cyclone at different stages, leading to the crops being planted at markedly different times.
"Therefore the rice crops matured at different times and provided food on the table of the rat for much longer than usual."
All of this led to the rats breeding for longer and to their young maturing and breeding before the cropping season ended. The result: another explosion in the rat population.
There was anecdotal evidence that the cyclone also wiped out predators, including snakes, that would otherwise have preyed on the rats.
This, along with abandoned land and fewer humans to catch the rodents, left them with little control over their numbers.
Between June and September 2009, community rat collection campaigns conducted in just a few townships in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta collected more than 2.6 million rats.
Dr Belmain says the huge number of rodents was related to the cyclone.
"Outbreaks of this magnitude have not been recorded in the previous 30 years in this delta," he tells BBC News.
The scientists believe that outbreaks of rodent and other crop pest populations following extreme weather events [are] likely to become more common with the onset of climate change.
Unusual pests
Not just one rodent species involved, but one of the main culprits in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta is Bandicota savilei.
This common rat is a native species, rather than an invasive predator that has found itself in a new environment with no strong competition.
It seems though that the ecological landscape is so warped by the bamboo masting that this has become a native species gone bad.
The rats can produce a litter every three weeks and the baby rats reach sexual maturity in just 50-60 days.
For the scientists, it is a frustrating problem, because the solutions are relatively straightforward.
Dr Belmain says: "Most of the methods used for pest control are not working at all."
"In India, individual farmers often buy a handful of poison at the market and spread it around."
One solution could be a simple plastic sheeting fence - containing holes that lead into rat traps.
So Dr Belmain and his colleagues hope to reach local farmers and teach them that by laying efficient traps at the right times, they could reduce the amount of food they lose.
Dr Belmain says: They're either engrained in apathy because they've tried and failed to control it or they don't appreciate how much they're losing to rats.
"So you really have to hold their hands and show them their lives can be better.
"People can do a lot more if they're organised."
Preparation, it seems, will be key to facing the next rat army.
Hear more about the rat floods from Steve Belmain in an interview with Science in Action on the BBC World Service
By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9198000/9198744.stm
Others believe it to be an act of God, an inevitability.
It isn't water flooding the precious farmland in north-eastern India, but rats.
A once in a generation, gigantic plague of rats, that ruins crops and leaves people starving.
A rat army so big, so mythical, that until now some scientists did not believe it was real.
This explosion in the rodent population, leading to swarms of hungry pests, is caused by a glut in the food supply, namely bamboo seeds, researchers have confirmed.
And it is a perfect example of how the simple relationship between two apparently innocuous species, a tall grass and a tiny rodent, can turn the ecology of a whole region upside down: wiping out wildlife, destroying agriculture and leaving people destitute.
Worse, scientists suspect that climate change may create even bigger rat armies in the future.
Bamboo carpet
Bamboo forest covers more than 26,000 square kilometres throughout the north-eastern state of Mizoram, extending into the Chin Hills of Burma and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.
This species of bamboo (Melcocanna baccifera) is invaluable for farmers whose entire livelihood is based on what they can grow.
It provides a building material, clothing and even food - in the form of bamboo shoots.
Ecologically though, it is an aggressive plant that has annihilated its competition, and carpeted the area.
Approximately every 50 years, though, that carpet of forest dies off.
Whatever the environmental conditions, an internal clock signals to each plant that it is time to flower, set seed and die.
"It's a way for the bamboo to ensure that the seeds survive," explains Steve Belmain, an ecologist from Greenwich University in London.
"But when the bamboo seed falls - you end up with 80 tonnes of seed per hectare on the ground.
"That's 80 tonnes of food just lying there waiting to be eaten."
For Dr Belmain and his colleagues, the most recent bamboo flowering, which began in 2004 and will continue to 2011, provided a unique opportunity to study an event that only occurs every half century.
"Before this, all we had was anecdotes from 50 years ago," he told BBC News.
"It had become a legend - many people who live in the area now weren't alive during the last outbreak."
'Rat armies'
It is only now that scientists have accepted that the "bamboo masting" is the trigger for the outbreaks.
The infrequency and scale of the event rendered it somewhat mythical.
"The many fantastic stories make it much harder for scientists to take it seriously and separate fact from fiction," says Dr Belmain.
When his colleagues interviewed the communities in the Hill Tracts, some people talked about "rat armies" that appear to work together.
And many believed the rat plagues to be an act of God.
The big problem for local farmers is that their low-growing rice crops make easy pickings for the voracious pests.
Dr Belmain says that, when the rats come, some people simply do not bother planting crops. They just accept that it is pointless.
He and his colleague Grant Singleton from the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, Philippines, have just compiled and edited a new book, Rodent outbreaks - Ecology and impacts.
The book brings together the findings of teams of scientists working in the region, studying the local ecology and agricultural practices.
On top of widespread starvation, Dr Singleton tells BBC News, that the rat floods turn the whole forest ecology "upside down".
"There is a huge impact on insects and other wildlife too - habitats and food are simply wiped out," he says.
Pest apathy
But, despite the fact that the locals see their crops ravaged, there is little to no drive to do anything about it.
The scientists say there is an overwhelming feeling of apathy in the region.
And in the lowlands of Burma, cyclone Nargis - an event that itself killed an estimated 140,000 people - actually made the problem even worse.
Dr Singleton explains: "Because the cyclone was so intense and so much life was lost, there were a lot of areas abandoned that would normally be cropped.
"And these areas became overgrown with grasses and weeds that were a major breeding ground for the rodents.
"Also smallholder farmers recovered from the cyclone at different stages, leading to the crops being planted at markedly different times.
"Therefore the rice crops matured at different times and provided food on the table of the rat for much longer than usual."
All of this led to the rats breeding for longer and to their young maturing and breeding before the cropping season ended. The result: another explosion in the rat population.
There was anecdotal evidence that the cyclone also wiped out predators, including snakes, that would otherwise have preyed on the rats.
This, along with abandoned land and fewer humans to catch the rodents, left them with little control over their numbers.
Between June and September 2009, community rat collection campaigns conducted in just a few townships in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta collected more than 2.6 million rats.
Dr Belmain says the huge number of rodents was related to the cyclone.
"Outbreaks of this magnitude have not been recorded in the previous 30 years in this delta," he tells BBC News.
The scientists believe that outbreaks of rodent and other crop pest populations following extreme weather events [are] likely to become more common with the onset of climate change.
Unusual pests
Not just one rodent species involved, but one of the main culprits in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta is Bandicota savilei.
This common rat is a native species, rather than an invasive predator that has found itself in a new environment with no strong competition.
It seems though that the ecological landscape is so warped by the bamboo masting that this has become a native species gone bad.
The rats can produce a litter every three weeks and the baby rats reach sexual maturity in just 50-60 days.
For the scientists, it is a frustrating problem, because the solutions are relatively straightforward.
Dr Belmain says: "Most of the methods used for pest control are not working at all."
"In India, individual farmers often buy a handful of poison at the market and spread it around."
One solution could be a simple plastic sheeting fence - containing holes that lead into rat traps.
So Dr Belmain and his colleagues hope to reach local farmers and teach them that by laying efficient traps at the right times, they could reduce the amount of food they lose.
Dr Belmain says: They're either engrained in apathy because they've tried and failed to control it or they don't appreciate how much they're losing to rats.
"So you really have to hold their hands and show them their lives can be better.
"People can do a lot more if they're organised."
Preparation, it seems, will be key to facing the next rat army.
Hear more about the rat floods from Steve Belmain in an interview with Science in Action on the BBC World Service
By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9198000/9198744.stm
Friday, October 1, 2010
In search of the giant rat
Are plagues of huge rats really overrunning the UK? There was only one way to find out…
Emine Saner
guardian.co.uk,
Sunday 19 September 2010 20.30 BST
Mac Hussain disappears into the undergrowth. "Mind out, there's broken glass there," comes his voice from the other side of some brambles. Between short rain breaks in the sodden sky, we are on the hunt for giant rats. There are thought to be at least four here – well that's what Brandon Goddard told the Sun recently, after it ran a picture of him holding a giant rat he claimed to have shot on this Bradford estate. "The first went right past but we got the second one. Then three more got away," Goddard, who lives in nearby Wakefield, told the paper. "This one I shot was absolutely terrifying. I was shaking. Goodness knows where the others went."
Thankfully, there is no sign of them now – but if you heard that a Sun reporter and a man with an air rifle were on your tail, would you hang around? We poke about in the undergrowth on a bit of wasteland. "Ideal place for rats, this," says Hussain. He has been a pest controller for 12 years. "There has been so much rain over the last few weeks that it will have had an effect, physically pushing the rats out of the sewer system."
Last month, Yorkshire Water warned of just such an increase in the number of rats in Bradford. The company, which baits around 100,000 of its manholes, reported a rise in "takes" (poison disappearing from bait boxes). A spokes-man put this down to households and food businesses pouring cooking oil down the drains, where it congeals in the sewers and the rats feed on it.
"I think the numbers are increasing," says Hussain. "I'm certainly getting more calls." He thinks several factors are at work: "Bin collections are getting less regular, there are more takeaways opening, and people throw so much food away now. The [rats'] size does seem to be getting bigger compared to when I started out."
But he is not convinced that so-called giant rats exist. "If you get a well-fed rat, it can be 15 inches – plus the tail can be seven or eight inches. And people always think a rat is bigger than it is. I get a panicky call from someone saying they've seen a huge rat, and it turns out to be a mouse." The biggest rat Hussain has ever caught was 14 inches (not including the tail). "If you stretched it out, you could probably get it to two feet."
Every year there are stories of towns and villages that are supposedly "rat infested". This summer it was Haltwhistle in Northumberland. Last year, it was Flamborough in Yorkshire and two unidentified Berkshire towns that were becoming "overrun". A woman, who asks not to be named, stops to watch. "I think it's a load of rubbish," she says. "I've been here four years and never seen a giant rat. It's wrong to say we're being invaded."
There was some speculation that the giant rat Goddard claimed to have shot was actually a coypu, a South American rodent sometimes kept as a pet. But we can't find any coypus either. Later, when I consult Stephen Battersby, a rat expert and president of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, he inclines towards the coypu suggestion. But does he think rat numbers are increasing? "The indicators appear to be that they are, but there is also a natural population cycle, so it's hard to know."
What is certain is that rats have a serious image problem. Personally, I quite like them, but for most people – fed by horror-film imagery and the fact that rats are always blamed for the plague (it was actually the fleas they carried that were responsible) – they are the stuff of nightmares; think of the rats in Room 101 trying to gnaw away at Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984. Mice, though still considered vermin, are at least seen as fairly cute.
Putting a figure on the number of rats in the UK is difficult. It is often claimed there is one rat for every person, meaning there are more than 60 million. "That's a myth," says Battersby, explaining that this came from an estimate of the rat population just after the first world war, when there were fewer people and farming practices included building hay ricks where rats thrived. "Life has changed a great deal since then. I would say there could be in the order of 20 million. But if you have rats in and around your home, it doesn't matter what the number is in the rest of the country, it's those you have to worry about."
Rats can get in "through a gap as small as half an inch," says Battersby. "They can flatten themselves. They're also extremely clever, and can swim and jump." Hussain says they also burrow under foundations. "I've seen holes chewed in walls, concrete gnawed through. The damage they do is unbelievable. People don't want to admit they have a rat problem – it sounds as if they are dirty – but rats will come in if there's access and there's food lying around. If you're feeding the birds, that's a really good source of food. So is home composting."
Rats are not great climbers, but they can shimmy their way up a house in the gap between drainpipe and wall, then get into the roof. "A common route is through ruptured drains or poorly covered drains," says Hussain. My friend, Helen, came home from work one day and heard a splashing noise coming from her downstairs loo – there, treading water in the toilet bowl, was a wet rat. She left London shortly afterwards. "I've seen plastic pipes on the back of a toilet chewed through," Hussain confirms.
Neither the black rat, which is all but extinct now, nor the brown rat are native to the UK. It is believed the black rat came to this island with the Romans, and the brown rat in the 17th century as trade and shipping grew. Rats have travelled all over the world as stowaways on boats, colonising their destination. And, of course, they carry health risks to humans. "Leptospirosis [Weil's disease] is relatively rare," says Battersby. "But if you're taking part in water sports or go fishing, make sure you don't have any open cuts. If you're working in the sewers, the same. But for the general public, it's not really the issue."
More problematic, he says, are the parasites that rats often carry. These include cryptosporidium, which causes diarrhoea, Toxoplasma gondii, which can be fatal to unborn children, "and a lot of worm infections, which can cause stomach problems. There is certainly an association between rat allergen and asthma. Rats excrete salmonella as well, and potentially E coli."
Richard Moseley, from the British Pest Control Association, says rodents are also to blame for some house fires, "because they chew through electric cables". Rats that chew through cables on the rail network cause obvious problems, and getting a rat trapped in a piece of machinery in a factory means production can be stopped for days. "That's a lot of manufacturing you've lost."
Now pest control experts warn that we could be on the brink of an explosion in the numbers of rats as local councils, strapped by budget cuts, put vermin control low down their list of priorities. An even bigger threat, says Moseley, are proposed EU changes to the use of rodenticide. "There are going to be some restrictions, but we're not sure what those are going to be yet."
There are also suggestions that rats are becoming resistant to rodenticides. Robert Smith, a retired professor, is working on a survey of rats from around six areas of the UK that have become resistant to anticoagulant, the main rodenticide used by pest controllers. "People have been trying to deal with rats for centuries," Smith says. "They used to use toxic plants to poison them, but rats evolved behaviour to counteract that. They developed 'taste aversion'. They are neophobic – they have a fear of anything 'new' – so with a new food, they won't gorge themselves on it, they will just nibble, then go away and see if it harms them. Rodents can't vomit; once they've swallowed something they can't get rid of it, so they are very careful. If something makes them feel ill, the memory of that taste stays with them for their lifetime." What's more, he says, rats can communicate this information to other rats, probably through scent on their breath. "That makes it difficult to kill a rat with anything that makes them feel ill quickly."
This is where anticoagulant rodenticide comes in – preventing blood clotting so a rodent, squeezing through tiny gaps and picking up small injuries, effectively bleeds to death internally. More importantly, rodenticide are slow-acting, so the rat never learns to associate the bait with what is killing them. They were introduced around 1950 and, by 1958, scientists found the first record of resistance. "In the 70s, chemists devised new versions of the anti- coagulant that overcame resistance so it looked like problem solved." It wasn't though. By the early 90s, rats in southern England were displaying signs of resistance. "There are now parts of Berkshire and Hampshire where it seems it's not possible to control the rats, not with chemicals that are legal to use."
How long will it be before the entire rat population is resistant? "It really depends on how extensive resistance is, and how quickly it spreads – we just don't know at the moment," admits Smith, who is aiming to have all the samples in by the end of April. If all rats became resistant to anticoagulants, he says, "I guess we would be back to where we were during the 40s. There would be significant amounts of contamination of food – we would have to get used to rat droppings and hairs in food. Then there are the diseases that can be spread to other animals, including livestock and people." And if rats are getting bigger, he says, it could be that they have genetic resistance, "which means they live longer – rats keep growing".
Hussain and I drive to an area of Bradford to which he has been called out before. Mohammed, who runs a taxi company at the end of a residential street, says he has a problem with rats. "There's one we see that's the size of a small cat, but it always gets away. We put those glue traps down." Mohammed says it was caught but managed to escape, leaving hair stuck to a pad like someone freeing themselves of their trousers.
He takes us to a room at the back of his office and the first thing you notice are all the holes in the ceiling. "They go in the ceiling to die and it really stinks." He made the holes in the plasterboard to cut them out – it looks like the work of someone driven demented by rats. "I think they came from the restaurant next door, until it closed down. I looked in the window once and there were five or six rats in there. They're not scared."
Back in the car, Hussain explains how he rids a house of rats. He uses boxes baited with anticoagulant; traps don't tend to work. "You're talking about an intelligent animal – if something is killing its friends, it will stay away," he says. After a week or so, he returns to look for the bodies and remove them for incineration.
I'm starting to feel a bit sorry for rats. I had one - his name was Geronimo – when I was a child, so I know they are intelligent, affectionate animals. And if rats are on the increase, it is surely our fault. We tempt them into our homes and workplaces with the shameful amount of food we throw away. "We don't have an active rat population without human activity," says Battersby. "If people throw food litter around, or don't store their refuse correctly, don't be surprised if you get rats. The way rats behave are usually a reflection of the way we behave."
As the sky darkens again, we are forced to give up the search for giant rats. I've been trying to work out if Hussain actually likes rats, or feels a bit sorry for them, but he won't bite. Eventually, as we drive to look at a bait box outside a fried-chicken restaurant, he admits to a grudging respect. "They are a formidable adversary," he says.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/19/in-search-of-giant-rat
Emine Saner
guardian.co.uk,
Sunday 19 September 2010 20.30 BST
Mac Hussain disappears into the undergrowth. "Mind out, there's broken glass there," comes his voice from the other side of some brambles. Between short rain breaks in the sodden sky, we are on the hunt for giant rats. There are thought to be at least four here – well that's what Brandon Goddard told the Sun recently, after it ran a picture of him holding a giant rat he claimed to have shot on this Bradford estate. "The first went right past but we got the second one. Then three more got away," Goddard, who lives in nearby Wakefield, told the paper. "This one I shot was absolutely terrifying. I was shaking. Goodness knows where the others went."
Thankfully, there is no sign of them now – but if you heard that a Sun reporter and a man with an air rifle were on your tail, would you hang around? We poke about in the undergrowth on a bit of wasteland. "Ideal place for rats, this," says Hussain. He has been a pest controller for 12 years. "There has been so much rain over the last few weeks that it will have had an effect, physically pushing the rats out of the sewer system."
Last month, Yorkshire Water warned of just such an increase in the number of rats in Bradford. The company, which baits around 100,000 of its manholes, reported a rise in "takes" (poison disappearing from bait boxes). A spokes-man put this down to households and food businesses pouring cooking oil down the drains, where it congeals in the sewers and the rats feed on it.
"I think the numbers are increasing," says Hussain. "I'm certainly getting more calls." He thinks several factors are at work: "Bin collections are getting less regular, there are more takeaways opening, and people throw so much food away now. The [rats'] size does seem to be getting bigger compared to when I started out."
But he is not convinced that so-called giant rats exist. "If you get a well-fed rat, it can be 15 inches – plus the tail can be seven or eight inches. And people always think a rat is bigger than it is. I get a panicky call from someone saying they've seen a huge rat, and it turns out to be a mouse." The biggest rat Hussain has ever caught was 14 inches (not including the tail). "If you stretched it out, you could probably get it to two feet."
Every year there are stories of towns and villages that are supposedly "rat infested". This summer it was Haltwhistle in Northumberland. Last year, it was Flamborough in Yorkshire and two unidentified Berkshire towns that were becoming "overrun". A woman, who asks not to be named, stops to watch. "I think it's a load of rubbish," she says. "I've been here four years and never seen a giant rat. It's wrong to say we're being invaded."
There was some speculation that the giant rat Goddard claimed to have shot was actually a coypu, a South American rodent sometimes kept as a pet. But we can't find any coypus either. Later, when I consult Stephen Battersby, a rat expert and president of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, he inclines towards the coypu suggestion. But does he think rat numbers are increasing? "The indicators appear to be that they are, but there is also a natural population cycle, so it's hard to know."
What is certain is that rats have a serious image problem. Personally, I quite like them, but for most people – fed by horror-film imagery and the fact that rats are always blamed for the plague (it was actually the fleas they carried that were responsible) – they are the stuff of nightmares; think of the rats in Room 101 trying to gnaw away at Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984. Mice, though still considered vermin, are at least seen as fairly cute.
Putting a figure on the number of rats in the UK is difficult. It is often claimed there is one rat for every person, meaning there are more than 60 million. "That's a myth," says Battersby, explaining that this came from an estimate of the rat population just after the first world war, when there were fewer people and farming practices included building hay ricks where rats thrived. "Life has changed a great deal since then. I would say there could be in the order of 20 million. But if you have rats in and around your home, it doesn't matter what the number is in the rest of the country, it's those you have to worry about."
Rats can get in "through a gap as small as half an inch," says Battersby. "They can flatten themselves. They're also extremely clever, and can swim and jump." Hussain says they also burrow under foundations. "I've seen holes chewed in walls, concrete gnawed through. The damage they do is unbelievable. People don't want to admit they have a rat problem – it sounds as if they are dirty – but rats will come in if there's access and there's food lying around. If you're feeding the birds, that's a really good source of food. So is home composting."
Rats are not great climbers, but they can shimmy their way up a house in the gap between drainpipe and wall, then get into the roof. "A common route is through ruptured drains or poorly covered drains," says Hussain. My friend, Helen, came home from work one day and heard a splashing noise coming from her downstairs loo – there, treading water in the toilet bowl, was a wet rat. She left London shortly afterwards. "I've seen plastic pipes on the back of a toilet chewed through," Hussain confirms.
Neither the black rat, which is all but extinct now, nor the brown rat are native to the UK. It is believed the black rat came to this island with the Romans, and the brown rat in the 17th century as trade and shipping grew. Rats have travelled all over the world as stowaways on boats, colonising their destination. And, of course, they carry health risks to humans. "Leptospirosis [Weil's disease] is relatively rare," says Battersby. "But if you're taking part in water sports or go fishing, make sure you don't have any open cuts. If you're working in the sewers, the same. But for the general public, it's not really the issue."
More problematic, he says, are the parasites that rats often carry. These include cryptosporidium, which causes diarrhoea, Toxoplasma gondii, which can be fatal to unborn children, "and a lot of worm infections, which can cause stomach problems. There is certainly an association between rat allergen and asthma. Rats excrete salmonella as well, and potentially E coli."
Richard Moseley, from the British Pest Control Association, says rodents are also to blame for some house fires, "because they chew through electric cables". Rats that chew through cables on the rail network cause obvious problems, and getting a rat trapped in a piece of machinery in a factory means production can be stopped for days. "That's a lot of manufacturing you've lost."
Now pest control experts warn that we could be on the brink of an explosion in the numbers of rats as local councils, strapped by budget cuts, put vermin control low down their list of priorities. An even bigger threat, says Moseley, are proposed EU changes to the use of rodenticide. "There are going to be some restrictions, but we're not sure what those are going to be yet."
There are also suggestions that rats are becoming resistant to rodenticides. Robert Smith, a retired professor, is working on a survey of rats from around six areas of the UK that have become resistant to anticoagulant, the main rodenticide used by pest controllers. "People have been trying to deal with rats for centuries," Smith says. "They used to use toxic plants to poison them, but rats evolved behaviour to counteract that. They developed 'taste aversion'. They are neophobic – they have a fear of anything 'new' – so with a new food, they won't gorge themselves on it, they will just nibble, then go away and see if it harms them. Rodents can't vomit; once they've swallowed something they can't get rid of it, so they are very careful. If something makes them feel ill, the memory of that taste stays with them for their lifetime." What's more, he says, rats can communicate this information to other rats, probably through scent on their breath. "That makes it difficult to kill a rat with anything that makes them feel ill quickly."
This is where anticoagulant rodenticide comes in – preventing blood clotting so a rodent, squeezing through tiny gaps and picking up small injuries, effectively bleeds to death internally. More importantly, rodenticide are slow-acting, so the rat never learns to associate the bait with what is killing them. They were introduced around 1950 and, by 1958, scientists found the first record of resistance. "In the 70s, chemists devised new versions of the anti- coagulant that overcame resistance so it looked like problem solved." It wasn't though. By the early 90s, rats in southern England were displaying signs of resistance. "There are now parts of Berkshire and Hampshire where it seems it's not possible to control the rats, not with chemicals that are legal to use."
How long will it be before the entire rat population is resistant? "It really depends on how extensive resistance is, and how quickly it spreads – we just don't know at the moment," admits Smith, who is aiming to have all the samples in by the end of April. If all rats became resistant to anticoagulants, he says, "I guess we would be back to where we were during the 40s. There would be significant amounts of contamination of food – we would have to get used to rat droppings and hairs in food. Then there are the diseases that can be spread to other animals, including livestock and people." And if rats are getting bigger, he says, it could be that they have genetic resistance, "which means they live longer – rats keep growing".
Hussain and I drive to an area of Bradford to which he has been called out before. Mohammed, who runs a taxi company at the end of a residential street, says he has a problem with rats. "There's one we see that's the size of a small cat, but it always gets away. We put those glue traps down." Mohammed says it was caught but managed to escape, leaving hair stuck to a pad like someone freeing themselves of their trousers.
He takes us to a room at the back of his office and the first thing you notice are all the holes in the ceiling. "They go in the ceiling to die and it really stinks." He made the holes in the plasterboard to cut them out – it looks like the work of someone driven demented by rats. "I think they came from the restaurant next door, until it closed down. I looked in the window once and there were five or six rats in there. They're not scared."
Back in the car, Hussain explains how he rids a house of rats. He uses boxes baited with anticoagulant; traps don't tend to work. "You're talking about an intelligent animal – if something is killing its friends, it will stay away," he says. After a week or so, he returns to look for the bodies and remove them for incineration.
I'm starting to feel a bit sorry for rats. I had one - his name was Geronimo – when I was a child, so I know they are intelligent, affectionate animals. And if rats are on the increase, it is surely our fault. We tempt them into our homes and workplaces with the shameful amount of food we throw away. "We don't have an active rat population without human activity," says Battersby. "If people throw food litter around, or don't store their refuse correctly, don't be surprised if you get rats. The way rats behave are usually a reflection of the way we behave."
As the sky darkens again, we are forced to give up the search for giant rats. I've been trying to work out if Hussain actually likes rats, or feels a bit sorry for them, but he won't bite. Eventually, as we drive to look at a bait box outside a fried-chicken restaurant, he admits to a grudging respect. "They are a formidable adversary," he says.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/19/in-search-of-giant-rat
In search of the giant rat
Are plagues of huge rats really overrunning the UK? There was only one way to find out…
Emine Saner
guardian.co.uk,
Sunday 19 September 2010 20.30 BST
Mac Hussain disappears into the undergrowth. "Mind out, there's broken glass there," comes his voice from the other side of some brambles. Between short rain breaks in the sodden sky, we are on the hunt for giant rats. There are thought to be at least four here – well that's what Brandon Goddard told the Sun recently, after it ran a picture of him holding a giant rat he claimed to have shot on this Bradford estate. "The first went right past but we got the second one. Then three more got away," Goddard, who lives in nearby Wakefield, told the paper. "This one I shot was absolutely terrifying. I was shaking. Goodness knows where the others went."
Thankfully, there is no sign of them now – but if you heard that a Sun reporter and a man with an air rifle were on your tail, would you hang around? We poke about in the undergrowth on a bit of wasteland. "Ideal place for rats, this," says Hussain. He has been a pest controller for 12 years. "There has been so much rain over the last few weeks that it will have had an effect, physically pushing the rats out of the sewer system."
Last month, Yorkshire Water warned of just such an increase in the number of rats in Bradford. The company, which baits around 100,000 of its manholes, reported a rise in "takes" (poison disappearing from bait boxes). A spokes-man put this down to households and food businesses pouring cooking oil down the drains, where it congeals in the sewers and the rats feed on it.
"I think the numbers are increasing," says Hussain. "I'm certainly getting more calls." He thinks several factors are at work: "Bin collections are getting less regular, there are more takeaways opening, and people throw so much food away now. The [rats'] size does seem to be getting bigger compared to when I started out."
But he is not convinced that so-called giant rats exist. "If you get a well-fed rat, it can be 15 inches – plus the tail can be seven or eight inches. And people always think a rat is bigger than it is. I get a panicky call from someone saying they've seen a huge rat, and it turns out to be a mouse." The biggest rat Hussain has ever caught was 14 inches (not including the tail). "If you stretched it out, you could probably get it to two feet."
Every year there are stories of towns and villages that are supposedly "rat infested". This summer it was Haltwhistle in Northumberland. Last year, it was Flamborough in Yorkshire and two unidentified Berkshire towns that were becoming "overrun". A woman, who asks not to be named, stops to watch. "I think it's a load of rubbish," she says. "I've been here four years and never seen a giant rat. It's wrong to say we're being invaded."
There was some speculation that the giant rat Goddard claimed to have shot was actually a coypu, a South American rodent sometimes kept as a pet. But we can't find any coypus either. Later, when I consult Stephen Battersby, a rat expert and president of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, he inclines towards the coypu suggestion. But does he think rat numbers are increasing? "The indicators appear to be that they are, but there is also a natural population cycle, so it's hard to know."
What is certain is that rats have a serious image problem. Personally, I quite like them, but for most people – fed by horror-film imagery and the fact that rats are always blamed for the plague (it was actually the fleas they carried that were responsible) – they are the stuff of nightmares; think of the rats in Room 101 trying to gnaw away at Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984. Mice, though still considered vermin, are at least seen as fairly cute.
Putting a figure on the number of rats in the UK is difficult. It is often claimed there is one rat for every person, meaning there are more than 60 million. "That's a myth," says Battersby, explaining that this came from an estimate of the rat population just after the first world war, when there were fewer people and farming practices included building hay ricks where rats thrived. "Life has changed a great deal since then. I would say there could be in the order of 20 million. But if you have rats in and around your home, it doesn't matter what the number is in the rest of the country, it's those you have to worry about."
Rats can get in "through a gap as small as half an inch," says Battersby. "They can flatten themselves. They're also extremely clever, and can swim and jump." Hussain says they also burrow under foundations. "I've seen holes chewed in walls, concrete gnawed through. The damage they do is unbelievable. People don't want to admit they have a rat problem – it sounds as if they are dirty – but rats will come in if there's access and there's food lying around. If you're feeding the birds, that's a really good source of food. So is home composting."
Rats are not great climbers, but they can shimmy their way up a house in the gap between drainpipe and wall, then get into the roof. "A common route is through ruptured drains or poorly covered drains," says Hussain. My friend, Helen, came home from work one day and heard a splashing noise coming from her downstairs loo – there, treading water in the toilet bowl, was a wet rat. She left London shortly afterwards. "I've seen plastic pipes on the back of a toilet chewed through," Hussain confirms.
Neither the black rat, which is all but extinct now, nor the brown rat are native to the UK. It is believed the black rat came to this island with the Romans, and the brown rat in the 17th century as trade and shipping grew. Rats have travelled all over the world as stowaways on boats, colonising their destination. And, of course, they carry health risks to humans. "Leptospirosis [Weil's disease] is relatively rare," says Battersby. "But if you're taking part in water sports or go fishing, make sure you don't have any open cuts. If you're working in the sewers, the same. But for the general public, it's not really the issue."
More problematic, he says, are the parasites that rats often carry. These include cryptosporidium, which causes diarrhoea, Toxoplasma gondii, which can be fatal to unborn children, "and a lot of worm infections, which can cause stomach problems. There is certainly an association between rat allergen and asthma. Rats excrete salmonella as well, and potentially E coli."
Richard Moseley, from the British Pest Control Association, says rodents are also to blame for some house fires, "because they chew through electric cables". Rats that chew through cables on the rail network cause obvious problems, and getting a rat trapped in a piece of machinery in a factory means production can be stopped for days. "That's a lot of manufacturing you've lost."
Now pest control experts warn that we could be on the brink of an explosion in the numbers of rats as local councils, strapped by budget cuts, put vermin control low down their list of priorities. An even bigger threat, says Moseley, are proposed EU changes to the use of rodenticide. "There are going to be some restrictions, but we're not sure what those are going to be yet."
There are also suggestions that rats are becoming resistant to rodenticides. Robert Smith, a retired professor, is working on a survey of rats from around six areas of the UK that have become resistant to anticoagulant, the main rodenticide used by pest controllers. "People have been trying to deal with rats for centuries," Smith says. "They used to use toxic plants to poison them, but rats evolved behaviour to counteract that. They developed 'taste aversion'. They are neophobic – they have a fear of anything 'new' – so with a new food, they won't gorge themselves on it, they will just nibble, then go away and see if it harms them. Rodents can't vomit; once they've swallowed something they can't get rid of it, so they are very careful. If something makes them feel ill, the memory of that taste stays with them for their lifetime." What's more, he says, rats can communicate this information to other rats, probably through scent on their breath. "That makes it difficult to kill a rat with anything that makes them feel ill quickly."
This is where anticoagulant rodenticide comes in – preventing blood clotting so a rodent, squeezing through tiny gaps and picking up small injuries, effectively bleeds to death internally. More importantly, rodenticide are slow-acting, so the rat never learns to associate the bait with what is killing them. They were introduced around 1950 and, by 1958, scientists found the first record of resistance. "In the 70s, chemists devised new versions of the anti- coagulant that overcame resistance so it looked like problem solved." It wasn't though. By the early 90s, rats in southern England were displaying signs of resistance. "There are now parts of Berkshire and Hampshire where it seems it's not possible to control the rats, not with chemicals that are legal to use."
How long will it be before the entire rat population is resistant? "It really depends on how extensive resistance is, and how quickly it spreads – we just don't know at the moment," admits Smith, who is aiming to have all the samples in by the end of April. If all rats became resistant to anticoagulants, he says, "I guess we would be back to where we were during the 40s. There would be significant amounts of contamination of food – we would have to get used to rat droppings and hairs in food. Then there are the diseases that can be spread to other animals, including livestock and people." And if rats are getting bigger, he says, it could be that they have genetic resistance, "which means they live longer – rats keep growing".
Hussain and I drive to an area of Bradford to which he has been called out before. Mohammed, who runs a taxi company at the end of a residential street, says he has a problem with rats. "There's one we see that's the size of a small cat, but it always gets away. We put those glue traps down." Mohammed says it was caught but managed to escape, leaving hair stuck to a pad like someone freeing themselves of their trousers.
He takes us to a room at the back of his office and the first thing you notice are all the holes in the ceiling. "They go in the ceiling to die and it really stinks." He made the holes in the plasterboard to cut them out – it looks like the work of someone driven demented by rats. "I think they came from the restaurant next door, until it closed down. I looked in the window once and there were five or six rats in there. They're not scared."
Back in the car, Hussain explains how he rids a house of rats. He uses boxes baited with anticoagulant; traps don't tend to work. "You're talking about an intelligent animal – if something is killing its friends, it will stay away," he says. After a week or so, he returns to look for the bodies and remove them for incineration.
I'm starting to feel a bit sorry for rats. I had one - his name was Geronimo – when I was a child, so I know they are intelligent, affectionate animals. And if rats are on the increase, it is surely our fault. We tempt them into our homes and workplaces with the shameful amount of food we throw away. "We don't have an active rat population without human activity," says Battersby. "If people throw food litter around, or don't store their refuse correctly, don't be surprised if you get rats. The way rats behave are usually a reflection of the way we behave."
As the sky darkens again, we are forced to give up the search for giant rats. I've been trying to work out if Hussain actually likes rats, or feels a bit sorry for them, but he won't bite. Eventually, as we drive to look at a bait box outside a fried-chicken restaurant, he admits to a grudging respect. "They are a formidable adversary," he says.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/19/in-search-of-giant-rat
Emine Saner
guardian.co.uk,
Sunday 19 September 2010 20.30 BST
Mac Hussain disappears into the undergrowth. "Mind out, there's broken glass there," comes his voice from the other side of some brambles. Between short rain breaks in the sodden sky, we are on the hunt for giant rats. There are thought to be at least four here – well that's what Brandon Goddard told the Sun recently, after it ran a picture of him holding a giant rat he claimed to have shot on this Bradford estate. "The first went right past but we got the second one. Then three more got away," Goddard, who lives in nearby Wakefield, told the paper. "This one I shot was absolutely terrifying. I was shaking. Goodness knows where the others went."
Thankfully, there is no sign of them now – but if you heard that a Sun reporter and a man with an air rifle were on your tail, would you hang around? We poke about in the undergrowth on a bit of wasteland. "Ideal place for rats, this," says Hussain. He has been a pest controller for 12 years. "There has been so much rain over the last few weeks that it will have had an effect, physically pushing the rats out of the sewer system."
Last month, Yorkshire Water warned of just such an increase in the number of rats in Bradford. The company, which baits around 100,000 of its manholes, reported a rise in "takes" (poison disappearing from bait boxes). A spokes-man put this down to households and food businesses pouring cooking oil down the drains, where it congeals in the sewers and the rats feed on it.
"I think the numbers are increasing," says Hussain. "I'm certainly getting more calls." He thinks several factors are at work: "Bin collections are getting less regular, there are more takeaways opening, and people throw so much food away now. The [rats'] size does seem to be getting bigger compared to when I started out."
But he is not convinced that so-called giant rats exist. "If you get a well-fed rat, it can be 15 inches – plus the tail can be seven or eight inches. And people always think a rat is bigger than it is. I get a panicky call from someone saying they've seen a huge rat, and it turns out to be a mouse." The biggest rat Hussain has ever caught was 14 inches (not including the tail). "If you stretched it out, you could probably get it to two feet."
Every year there are stories of towns and villages that are supposedly "rat infested". This summer it was Haltwhistle in Northumberland. Last year, it was Flamborough in Yorkshire and two unidentified Berkshire towns that were becoming "overrun". A woman, who asks not to be named, stops to watch. "I think it's a load of rubbish," she says. "I've been here four years and never seen a giant rat. It's wrong to say we're being invaded."
There was some speculation that the giant rat Goddard claimed to have shot was actually a coypu, a South American rodent sometimes kept as a pet. But we can't find any coypus either. Later, when I consult Stephen Battersby, a rat expert and president of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, he inclines towards the coypu suggestion. But does he think rat numbers are increasing? "The indicators appear to be that they are, but there is also a natural population cycle, so it's hard to know."
What is certain is that rats have a serious image problem. Personally, I quite like them, but for most people – fed by horror-film imagery and the fact that rats are always blamed for the plague (it was actually the fleas they carried that were responsible) – they are the stuff of nightmares; think of the rats in Room 101 trying to gnaw away at Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984. Mice, though still considered vermin, are at least seen as fairly cute.
Putting a figure on the number of rats in the UK is difficult. It is often claimed there is one rat for every person, meaning there are more than 60 million. "That's a myth," says Battersby, explaining that this came from an estimate of the rat population just after the first world war, when there were fewer people and farming practices included building hay ricks where rats thrived. "Life has changed a great deal since then. I would say there could be in the order of 20 million. But if you have rats in and around your home, it doesn't matter what the number is in the rest of the country, it's those you have to worry about."
Rats can get in "through a gap as small as half an inch," says Battersby. "They can flatten themselves. They're also extremely clever, and can swim and jump." Hussain says they also burrow under foundations. "I've seen holes chewed in walls, concrete gnawed through. The damage they do is unbelievable. People don't want to admit they have a rat problem – it sounds as if they are dirty – but rats will come in if there's access and there's food lying around. If you're feeding the birds, that's a really good source of food. So is home composting."
Rats are not great climbers, but they can shimmy their way up a house in the gap between drainpipe and wall, then get into the roof. "A common route is through ruptured drains or poorly covered drains," says Hussain. My friend, Helen, came home from work one day and heard a splashing noise coming from her downstairs loo – there, treading water in the toilet bowl, was a wet rat. She left London shortly afterwards. "I've seen plastic pipes on the back of a toilet chewed through," Hussain confirms.
Neither the black rat, which is all but extinct now, nor the brown rat are native to the UK. It is believed the black rat came to this island with the Romans, and the brown rat in the 17th century as trade and shipping grew. Rats have travelled all over the world as stowaways on boats, colonising their destination. And, of course, they carry health risks to humans. "Leptospirosis [Weil's disease] is relatively rare," says Battersby. "But if you're taking part in water sports or go fishing, make sure you don't have any open cuts. If you're working in the sewers, the same. But for the general public, it's not really the issue."
More problematic, he says, are the parasites that rats often carry. These include cryptosporidium, which causes diarrhoea, Toxoplasma gondii, which can be fatal to unborn children, "and a lot of worm infections, which can cause stomach problems. There is certainly an association between rat allergen and asthma. Rats excrete salmonella as well, and potentially E coli."
Richard Moseley, from the British Pest Control Association, says rodents are also to blame for some house fires, "because they chew through electric cables". Rats that chew through cables on the rail network cause obvious problems, and getting a rat trapped in a piece of machinery in a factory means production can be stopped for days. "That's a lot of manufacturing you've lost."
Now pest control experts warn that we could be on the brink of an explosion in the numbers of rats as local councils, strapped by budget cuts, put vermin control low down their list of priorities. An even bigger threat, says Moseley, are proposed EU changes to the use of rodenticide. "There are going to be some restrictions, but we're not sure what those are going to be yet."
There are also suggestions that rats are becoming resistant to rodenticides. Robert Smith, a retired professor, is working on a survey of rats from around six areas of the UK that have become resistant to anticoagulant, the main rodenticide used by pest controllers. "People have been trying to deal with rats for centuries," Smith says. "They used to use toxic plants to poison them, but rats evolved behaviour to counteract that. They developed 'taste aversion'. They are neophobic – they have a fear of anything 'new' – so with a new food, they won't gorge themselves on it, they will just nibble, then go away and see if it harms them. Rodents can't vomit; once they've swallowed something they can't get rid of it, so they are very careful. If something makes them feel ill, the memory of that taste stays with them for their lifetime." What's more, he says, rats can communicate this information to other rats, probably through scent on their breath. "That makes it difficult to kill a rat with anything that makes them feel ill quickly."
This is where anticoagulant rodenticide comes in – preventing blood clotting so a rodent, squeezing through tiny gaps and picking up small injuries, effectively bleeds to death internally. More importantly, rodenticide are slow-acting, so the rat never learns to associate the bait with what is killing them. They were introduced around 1950 and, by 1958, scientists found the first record of resistance. "In the 70s, chemists devised new versions of the anti- coagulant that overcame resistance so it looked like problem solved." It wasn't though. By the early 90s, rats in southern England were displaying signs of resistance. "There are now parts of Berkshire and Hampshire where it seems it's not possible to control the rats, not with chemicals that are legal to use."
How long will it be before the entire rat population is resistant? "It really depends on how extensive resistance is, and how quickly it spreads – we just don't know at the moment," admits Smith, who is aiming to have all the samples in by the end of April. If all rats became resistant to anticoagulants, he says, "I guess we would be back to where we were during the 40s. There would be significant amounts of contamination of food – we would have to get used to rat droppings and hairs in food. Then there are the diseases that can be spread to other animals, including livestock and people." And if rats are getting bigger, he says, it could be that they have genetic resistance, "which means they live longer – rats keep growing".
Hussain and I drive to an area of Bradford to which he has been called out before. Mohammed, who runs a taxi company at the end of a residential street, says he has a problem with rats. "There's one we see that's the size of a small cat, but it always gets away. We put those glue traps down." Mohammed says it was caught but managed to escape, leaving hair stuck to a pad like someone freeing themselves of their trousers.
He takes us to a room at the back of his office and the first thing you notice are all the holes in the ceiling. "They go in the ceiling to die and it really stinks." He made the holes in the plasterboard to cut them out – it looks like the work of someone driven demented by rats. "I think they came from the restaurant next door, until it closed down. I looked in the window once and there were five or six rats in there. They're not scared."
Back in the car, Hussain explains how he rids a house of rats. He uses boxes baited with anticoagulant; traps don't tend to work. "You're talking about an intelligent animal – if something is killing its friends, it will stay away," he says. After a week or so, he returns to look for the bodies and remove them for incineration.
I'm starting to feel a bit sorry for rats. I had one - his name was Geronimo – when I was a child, so I know they are intelligent, affectionate animals. And if rats are on the increase, it is surely our fault. We tempt them into our homes and workplaces with the shameful amount of food we throw away. "We don't have an active rat population without human activity," says Battersby. "If people throw food litter around, or don't store their refuse correctly, don't be surprised if you get rats. The way rats behave are usually a reflection of the way we behave."
As the sky darkens again, we are forced to give up the search for giant rats. I've been trying to work out if Hussain actually likes rats, or feels a bit sorry for them, but he won't bite. Eventually, as we drive to look at a bait box outside a fried-chicken restaurant, he admits to a grudging respect. "They are a formidable adversary," he says.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/19/in-search-of-giant-rat
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Australia faces worst plague of locusts in 75 years
Ideal breeding conditions for grasshoppersare expected to cost farmers billions
By Paul Rodgers
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Australia's Darling river is running with water again after a drought in the middle of the decade reduced it to a trickle. But the rains feeding the continent's fourth-longest river are not the undiluted good news you might expect. For the cloudbursts also create ideal conditions for an unwelcome pest – the Australian plague locust.
The warm, wet weather that prevailed last summer meant that three generations of locusts were born, each one up to 150 times larger than the previous generation. After over-wintering beneath the ground, the first generation of 2010 is already hatching. And following the wettest August in seven years, the climate is again perfect. The juveniles will spend 20 to 25 days eating and growing, shedding their exoskeletons five times before emerging as adults, when population pressure will force them to swarm.
It is impossible to say how many billions of bugs will take wing, but many experts fear this year's infestation could be the worst since records began – 75 years ago. All that one locust expert, Greg Sword, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, would say was: "South Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are all going to get hammered."
A one-kilometre wide swarm of locusts can chomp through 10 tons of crops – a third of their combined body weight – in a day. The New South Wales Farmers Association said an area the size of Spain was affected and the Government of Victoria alone forecasts A$2bn (£1.2bn) of damage.
Though locusts move slowly when the sun's up, at night they can fly high and fast, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres. "A farmer can go to bed at night not having seen a grasshopper all year and wake up in the morning to find his fields full of them," said Professor Sword.
All locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. The difference is a suite of genetic changes that kick in when population densities cross a critical threshold. In some species, they produce physical transformations – the desert locust of North Africa goes from green to black and yellow, for example – but the Australian plague locust merely reprogrammes its behaviour, from solitary to gregarious.
Swarms probably make use of the available food more efficiently as the leading edge is constantly pushing forwards into new vegetation. It may be fear more than hunger, however, that drives the locusts.
Locusts are highly cannibalistic, says Professor Sword, and any that stay still too long are likely to get nibbled. "Swarms are like lifeboats," he says, forging a gruesome metaphor. "If you're the only one in the boat, you could easily starve. But if you've got lots of company, you could be the last to survive. We call it travelling with your lunch."
Controlling the bugs involves spotter planes identifying juvenile bands that can be targets for attack by crop sprayers armed with pesticides. But eastern Australia is struggling to find enough pilots to take on all the work.
And the spraying itself comes at a cost. Apiarists have complained that their bees are in danger from pesticides and ecologists fear for the many animals that treat the locusts as a moving smorgasbord. Concerns have also been raised by bloggers and activists that some of the chemicals used could harm humans.
The best hope for phasing out the chemicals comes from research. But the goal, says Professor Sword, is control not eradication. "They were here long before humans arrived," he said.
(Source not given)
By Paul Rodgers
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Australia's Darling river is running with water again after a drought in the middle of the decade reduced it to a trickle. But the rains feeding the continent's fourth-longest river are not the undiluted good news you might expect. For the cloudbursts also create ideal conditions for an unwelcome pest – the Australian plague locust.
The warm, wet weather that prevailed last summer meant that three generations of locusts were born, each one up to 150 times larger than the previous generation. After over-wintering beneath the ground, the first generation of 2010 is already hatching. And following the wettest August in seven years, the climate is again perfect. The juveniles will spend 20 to 25 days eating and growing, shedding their exoskeletons five times before emerging as adults, when population pressure will force them to swarm.
It is impossible to say how many billions of bugs will take wing, but many experts fear this year's infestation could be the worst since records began – 75 years ago. All that one locust expert, Greg Sword, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, would say was: "South Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are all going to get hammered."
A one-kilometre wide swarm of locusts can chomp through 10 tons of crops – a third of their combined body weight – in a day. The New South Wales Farmers Association said an area the size of Spain was affected and the Government of Victoria alone forecasts A$2bn (£1.2bn) of damage.
Though locusts move slowly when the sun's up, at night they can fly high and fast, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres. "A farmer can go to bed at night not having seen a grasshopper all year and wake up in the morning to find his fields full of them," said Professor Sword.
All locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. The difference is a suite of genetic changes that kick in when population densities cross a critical threshold. In some species, they produce physical transformations – the desert locust of North Africa goes from green to black and yellow, for example – but the Australian plague locust merely reprogrammes its behaviour, from solitary to gregarious.
Swarms probably make use of the available food more efficiently as the leading edge is constantly pushing forwards into new vegetation. It may be fear more than hunger, however, that drives the locusts.
Locusts are highly cannibalistic, says Professor Sword, and any that stay still too long are likely to get nibbled. "Swarms are like lifeboats," he says, forging a gruesome metaphor. "If you're the only one in the boat, you could easily starve. But if you've got lots of company, you could be the last to survive. We call it travelling with your lunch."
Controlling the bugs involves spotter planes identifying juvenile bands that can be targets for attack by crop sprayers armed with pesticides. But eastern Australia is struggling to find enough pilots to take on all the work.
And the spraying itself comes at a cost. Apiarists have complained that their bees are in danger from pesticides and ecologists fear for the many animals that treat the locusts as a moving smorgasbord. Concerns have also been raised by bloggers and activists that some of the chemicals used could harm humans.
The best hope for phasing out the chemicals comes from research. But the goal, says Professor Sword, is control not eradication. "They were here long before humans arrived," he said.
(Source not given)
Australia faces worst plague of locusts in 75 years
Ideal breeding conditions for grasshoppersare expected to cost farmers billions
By Paul Rodgers
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Australia's Darling river is running with water again after a drought in the middle of the decade reduced it to a trickle. But the rains feeding the continent's fourth-longest river are not the undiluted good news you might expect. For the cloudbursts also create ideal conditions for an unwelcome pest – the Australian plague locust.
The warm, wet weather that prevailed last summer meant that three generations of locusts were born, each one up to 150 times larger than the previous generation. After over-wintering beneath the ground, the first generation of 2010 is already hatching. And following the wettest August in seven years, the climate is again perfect. The juveniles will spend 20 to 25 days eating and growing, shedding their exoskeletons five times before emerging as adults, when population pressure will force them to swarm.
It is impossible to say how many billions of bugs will take wing, but many experts fear this year's infestation could be the worst since records began – 75 years ago. All that one locust expert, Greg Sword, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, would say was: "South Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are all going to get hammered."
A one-kilometre wide swarm of locusts can chomp through 10 tons of crops – a third of their combined body weight – in a day. The New South Wales Farmers Association said an area the size of Spain was affected and the Government of Victoria alone forecasts A$2bn (£1.2bn) of damage.
Though locusts move slowly when the sun's up, at night they can fly high and fast, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres. "A farmer can go to bed at night not having seen a grasshopper all year and wake up in the morning to find his fields full of them," said Professor Sword.
All locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. The difference is a suite of genetic changes that kick in when population densities cross a critical threshold. In some species, they produce physical transformations – the desert locust of North Africa goes from green to black and yellow, for example – but the Australian plague locust merely reprogrammes its behaviour, from solitary to gregarious.
Swarms probably make use of the available food more efficiently as the leading edge is constantly pushing forwards into new vegetation. It may be fear more than hunger, however, that drives the locusts.
Locusts are highly cannibalistic, says Professor Sword, and any that stay still too long are likely to get nibbled. "Swarms are like lifeboats," he says, forging a gruesome metaphor. "If you're the only one in the boat, you could easily starve. But if you've got lots of company, you could be the last to survive. We call it travelling with your lunch."
Controlling the bugs involves spotter planes identifying juvenile bands that can be targets for attack by crop sprayers armed with pesticides. But eastern Australia is struggling to find enough pilots to take on all the work.
And the spraying itself comes at a cost. Apiarists have complained that their bees are in danger from pesticides and ecologists fear for the many animals that treat the locusts as a moving smorgasbord. Concerns have also been raised by bloggers and activists that some of the chemicals used could harm humans.
The best hope for phasing out the chemicals comes from research. But the goal, says Professor Sword, is control not eradication. "They were here long before humans arrived," he said.
(Source not given)
By Paul Rodgers
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Australia's Darling river is running with water again after a drought in the middle of the decade reduced it to a trickle. But the rains feeding the continent's fourth-longest river are not the undiluted good news you might expect. For the cloudbursts also create ideal conditions for an unwelcome pest – the Australian plague locust.
The warm, wet weather that prevailed last summer meant that three generations of locusts were born, each one up to 150 times larger than the previous generation. After over-wintering beneath the ground, the first generation of 2010 is already hatching. And following the wettest August in seven years, the climate is again perfect. The juveniles will spend 20 to 25 days eating and growing, shedding their exoskeletons five times before emerging as adults, when population pressure will force them to swarm.
It is impossible to say how many billions of bugs will take wing, but many experts fear this year's infestation could be the worst since records began – 75 years ago. All that one locust expert, Greg Sword, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, would say was: "South Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are all going to get hammered."
A one-kilometre wide swarm of locusts can chomp through 10 tons of crops – a third of their combined body weight – in a day. The New South Wales Farmers Association said an area the size of Spain was affected and the Government of Victoria alone forecasts A$2bn (£1.2bn) of damage.
Though locusts move slowly when the sun's up, at night they can fly high and fast, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres. "A farmer can go to bed at night not having seen a grasshopper all year and wake up in the morning to find his fields full of them," said Professor Sword.
All locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. The difference is a suite of genetic changes that kick in when population densities cross a critical threshold. In some species, they produce physical transformations – the desert locust of North Africa goes from green to black and yellow, for example – but the Australian plague locust merely reprogrammes its behaviour, from solitary to gregarious.
Swarms probably make use of the available food more efficiently as the leading edge is constantly pushing forwards into new vegetation. It may be fear more than hunger, however, that drives the locusts.
Locusts are highly cannibalistic, says Professor Sword, and any that stay still too long are likely to get nibbled. "Swarms are like lifeboats," he says, forging a gruesome metaphor. "If you're the only one in the boat, you could easily starve. But if you've got lots of company, you could be the last to survive. We call it travelling with your lunch."
Controlling the bugs involves spotter planes identifying juvenile bands that can be targets for attack by crop sprayers armed with pesticides. But eastern Australia is struggling to find enough pilots to take on all the work.
And the spraying itself comes at a cost. Apiarists have complained that their bees are in danger from pesticides and ecologists fear for the many animals that treat the locusts as a moving smorgasbord. Concerns have also been raised by bloggers and activists that some of the chemicals used could harm humans.
The best hope for phasing out the chemicals comes from research. But the goal, says Professor Sword, is control not eradication. "They were here long before humans arrived," he said.
(Source not given)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Spider-infested ship turned back from Guam
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/spiderinfested-ship-turned-back-from-guam-2030587.html
Spider-infested ship turned back from Guam
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Authorities in the US territory of Guam have turned away a ship after thousands of spiders overflowed from its cargo. The Guam Department of Agriculture said hundreds of large spiders and thousands of smaller ones were seen when stevedores began offloading insulation and beams for housing units from the ship, the M.V. Altavia.
The cargo was returned to the ship, and the Agriculture Department on Friday ordered that the ship not be allowed to dock. It was last ported in South Korea.
"When you get this many from this many various sizes, it's definitely an infestation," said Department of Agriculture Director Joseph Torres. Agriculture officials said they didn't know what type of spiders were on
the ship. But they said it's a type that is not normally found on Guam and there was concern the spiders could damage the island's environment.
"It's not on Guam," Torres said. "We don't want it here." The ship was carrying housing units and accessories that were to be used at a work force village expected to house up to 18,000 temporary workers.
Before the ship initially docked, officers with the Guam Customs and Quarantine Agency boarded the ship and gave clearance for cargo to be unlocked for offloading, said Bernadette Meno, an administrator for the Port Authority of Guam. But when port workers saw the spiders, the containers were ordered back on the ship and it was anchored in the harbor. The decision was later made not to let the ship return.
Marianas Steamship Agencies Inc. arranged for the ship's arrival and departure. Its vice president, Richard P. Sablan, said he will follow orders of customs, agriculture and US Coast Guard officials.
Spider-infested ship turned back from Guam
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Authorities in the US territory of Guam have turned away a ship after thousands of spiders overflowed from its cargo. The Guam Department of Agriculture said hundreds of large spiders and thousands of smaller ones were seen when stevedores began offloading insulation and beams for housing units from the ship, the M.V. Altavia.
The cargo was returned to the ship, and the Agriculture Department on Friday ordered that the ship not be allowed to dock. It was last ported in South Korea.
"When you get this many from this many various sizes, it's definitely an infestation," said Department of Agriculture Director Joseph Torres. Agriculture officials said they didn't know what type of spiders were on
the ship. But they said it's a type that is not normally found on Guam and there was concern the spiders could damage the island's environment.
"It's not on Guam," Torres said. "We don't want it here." The ship was carrying housing units and accessories that were to be used at a work force village expected to house up to 18,000 temporary workers.
Before the ship initially docked, officers with the Guam Customs and Quarantine Agency boarded the ship and gave clearance for cargo to be unlocked for offloading, said Bernadette Meno, an administrator for the Port Authority of Guam. But when port workers saw the spiders, the containers were ordered back on the ship and it was anchored in the harbor. The decision was later made not to let the ship return.
Marianas Steamship Agencies Inc. arranged for the ship's arrival and departure. Its vice president, Richard P. Sablan, said he will follow orders of customs, agriculture and US Coast Guard officials.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Group warns of mysterious bat plague sweeping country
RIGHT: The disease baffling scientists has been called the white nose syndrome because it manifests itself as a white coat around the bat's nose.May 12th, 2010
12:00 PM ET
Wildlife agencies in all 48 of the contiguous U.S. states have been put on notice after a mysterious bat-killing disease – white nose syndrome – was recently detected west of the Mississippi River.
The fungal disease, which has a 100 percent fatality rate, was first discovered in bats four years ago in Albany, New York, said Mollie Matteson, conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity.
The disease has subsequently spread into the Midwest, parts of the South, Canada, and most recently, Missouri, Matteson said.
Letters were sent to wildlife agencies to spur agencies to come up with response plans to stop the disease that has baffled scientists, Matteson said.
“It's absolutely devastating for the species it has affected so far,” Matteson said. The disease seems to strike only bats that hibernate, Matteson said.
WRTV: Bat disease keeping many Indiana caves closed
The disease, typically manifested by a white coat on the nose and in some cases on the animal's fur, has affected six species of the approximately 45 bat species in the entire United States.
But humans should be concerned.
“While we haven’t heard anything about transmission to humans, people can spread the disease,” Matteson said.
“They can spread it on their clothing and gear, because the fungal spores can be in the caves, particularly if people are crawling on the ground,” she said. “If they leave one cave where the spores are and go into another, they can contaminate it with those spores,” causing an outbreak, Matteson said.
A nonfatal version of the disease has been found in bats in Europe, Matteson said, but “bats here in North America have no defense.”
Although scientists are experimenting with various anti-fungal treatments, there is no known cure or effective treatment for white nose syndrome, Matteson said.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/12/group-warns-of-mysterious-bat-plague-sweeping-country/?hpt=C2
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Liberia: Mysterious insect identified
Posted on Friday 6 February 2009 - 07:25Murtala Mohamed Kamara, AfricaNews reporter in Freetown, Sierra Leone
The identity of mysterious caterpillars ravaging crops and contaminating water in northern Liberia has been established. A joint effort of the FAO, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and Commonwealth Agriculture Bureau International named the insect as Achaea catocaloides.
Georg Goergen, IITA entomologist and taxonomist explains: “The moth plague in Liberia is not African armyworms, or Spodoptera exempta, as earlier reported in the media, but belongs to the species A. catocaloides. Although Spodoptera and Achaea moths are related, their feeding and breeding habits are quite different. For example, caterpillars of armyworms generally don't attack trees as larvae of A. catocaloides do.”
In less than 10 days, the species swept across 100 villages and six communities in neighboring Guinea forcing the Liberian government to declare a state of emergency. Responding to the outbreak a visiting ECOWAS delegation this week donated the sum of USD$100, 000 to help fight the species.
“Without proper identification, the FAO and the Liberian government would have engaged in a huge effort fighting the wrong insect,” stated Manuele Tamò, IITA entomologist.
Eric Boa, Head of the Global Plant Clinic at CABI added: "Correct taxonomic identification of this insect is crucial for managing this worrying problem. Now efforts can be focused in the right direction.”
According to Goergen, the larvae or caterpillars, of A. catocaloides are primarily forest insects that feed on trees. However, populations can develop in large numbers and attack agricultural crops, especially in the absence and inefficiency of natural enemies brought about by climatic disturbances, such as the sudden interruption in rains, thereby leading to outbreaks of the moth.
http://www.africanews.com/site/Liberia_Mysterious_insect_identified/list_messages/23048
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Giant Echizen jellyfish off Japan coast
Monday, 30 November 2009Japan's fishing industry is under threat from an unusual predator. Swarms of giant jellyfish have appeared along the Pacific coast after apparently drifting from spawning grounds in Chinese and Korean waters.
The Echizen jellyfish have already cost the industry millions of Yen.
Ashleigh Nghiem reports.
See video at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8385953.stm
(Submitted by Tim Chapman)
Giant Echizen jellyfish off Japan coast
Monday, 30 November 2009Japan's fishing industry is under threat from an unusual predator. Swarms of giant jellyfish have appeared along the Pacific coast after apparently drifting from spawning grounds in Chinese and Korean waters.
The Echizen jellyfish have already cost the industry millions of Yen.
Ashleigh Nghiem reports.
See video at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8385953.stm
(Submitted by Tim Chapman)
'Sumo' jellyfish hit Japan
30 November 2009, 12:14
An invasion of giant jellyfish the size of sumo wrestlers is jeopardising the Japanese fishing industry.
The Echizen jellyfish, which grow up to 2.2m in diameter and can weigh over 300kg, have appeared on Japan's Pacific coast.
They have floating there from Chinese and Korean waters where they breed every year, reports Sky News.
Their size means they are capable of ruining fisherman's nets and poisoning and crushing catches.
One fishing boat was even capsized after a mammoth creature got caught in its net.
A local fisherman said: " I have never seen anything this big before."
Much about the jellyfish swarms remains a mystery but some scientists believe global warming and rising sea temperatures may be a factor.
Japan's Meteorological Agency says the waters of the Sea of Japan are warming at a speed three times faster than the global average.
http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/sumo_jellyfish_japan
An invasion of giant jellyfish the size of sumo wrestlers is jeopardising the Japanese fishing industry.
The Echizen jellyfish, which grow up to 2.2m in diameter and can weigh over 300kg, have appeared on Japan's Pacific coast.
They have floating there from Chinese and Korean waters where they breed every year, reports Sky News.
Their size means they are capable of ruining fisherman's nets and poisoning and crushing catches.
One fishing boat was even capsized after a mammoth creature got caught in its net.
A local fisherman said: " I have never seen anything this big before."
Much about the jellyfish swarms remains a mystery but some scientists believe global warming and rising sea temperatures may be a factor.
Japan's Meteorological Agency says the waters of the Sea of Japan are warming at a speed three times faster than the global average.
http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/sumo_jellyfish_japan
'Sumo' jellyfish hit Japan
30 November 2009, 12:14
An invasion of giant jellyfish the size of sumo wrestlers is jeopardising the Japanese fishing industry.
The Echizen jellyfish, which grow up to 2.2m in diameter and can weigh over 300kg, have appeared on Japan's Pacific coast.
They have floating there from Chinese and Korean waters where they breed every year, reports Sky News.
Their size means they are capable of ruining fisherman's nets and poisoning and crushing catches.
One fishing boat was even capsized after a mammoth creature got caught in its net.
A local fisherman said: " I have never seen anything this big before."
Much about the jellyfish swarms remains a mystery but some scientists believe global warming and rising sea temperatures may be a factor.
Japan's Meteorological Agency says the waters of the Sea of Japan are warming at a speed three times faster than the global average.
http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/sumo_jellyfish_japan
An invasion of giant jellyfish the size of sumo wrestlers is jeopardising the Japanese fishing industry.
The Echizen jellyfish, which grow up to 2.2m in diameter and can weigh over 300kg, have appeared on Japan's Pacific coast.
They have floating there from Chinese and Korean waters where they breed every year, reports Sky News.
Their size means they are capable of ruining fisherman's nets and poisoning and crushing catches.
One fishing boat was even capsized after a mammoth creature got caught in its net.
A local fisherman said: " I have never seen anything this big before."
Much about the jellyfish swarms remains a mystery but some scientists believe global warming and rising sea temperatures may be a factor.
Japan's Meteorological Agency says the waters of the Sea of Japan are warming at a speed three times faster than the global average.
http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/sumo_jellyfish_japan
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