Monday, April 11, 2016

Rat Scent Traps

By Cameron O.

Quickly heading over to ScienceDaily.com, I found a brand new article that discuses a way that exterminators can catch and exterminate rats. Rats without a doubt have grown over previous years bringing with them a growth in diseases and poor health conditions in buildings and public and also diminish agricultural crop yields.
The article goes briefly over how we can now “identifying and synthetically replicating the male brown rat's sex pheromone” which will lure female brown rats into traps. Through testing in lab and in the field, this way to capture the female rats has shown to work.


Gerhard Gries, professor of biological sciences and NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Multimodal Animal Communication Ecology at SFU, was quoted saying; "We're beginning to understand their pheromones (chemical attractants), we understand their sound communication and can reproduce it, and we understand their food preferences.” The article then explains that this way of capturing rats is more beneficial because it will not kill the rats captured or the animals that eat the rats, but instead gives the exterminators ways to safely deal with a rat infestation.
This news was interesting to me because I am not someone who enjoys seeing rats get killed, but I do understand that the rats bring too much negativity and poor health conditions which in turn make me alright with handing them in this manner.
I am interested as to how these techniques will grow and develop as well as what other pests we can capture in this way.


References: Simon Fraser University. (2016, April 11). New way to smell a rat means end for rodents. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 11, 2016 from    www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160411152826.htm
 Solutions, R. (n.d.). All Posts - Rats/Mice  Retrieved April 11, 2016, from http://rodentsolutioninc.com/rats-mice 

                Image: http://rodentsolutioninc.com/rats-mice

4 comments:

  1. Toby K.

    This looks like an awesome new way to catch rats. I know that the previous method of putting cheese out can be very tedious and i look forward to seeing if this would actually work.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Toby K.

    This looks like an awesome new way to catch rats. I know that the previous method of putting cheese out can be very tedious and i look forward to seeing if this would actually work.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This was a good post! Rats are a problem for a number of reasons, and it seems like this could be a good way to handle those issues. I like how you incorporated your opinion at the end, and I too agree that it is not fun to see rats get killed, but we still need to deal with the problem at hand. Good job!

    Emily T

    ReplyDelete
  4. Excess rats are a true problem and that needs to be dealt with. I am not for just finding rats and killing them so this new technique seems very promising. Seems like a great way to handle the problem in a humane way. Interested to see what happens with this and where is goes in the future!

    ReplyDelete