You usually think of rats causing havoc on the city streets in most industrialized areas of the world. Like the saying, "where there are people there are rats", well think again. Rats are becoming more dangerous to rural areas than most ecologists once thought, case in point. Non-native rats on islands are known to attack seabirds ground level nests.


Rats have been known to devastate the bird population with details coming from a new study by the National Academy of Sciences that shows that rats not only destroy the avian population but in doing so also destroy the seaweed population. Some of the birds that the rats are attacking are predators of invertebrates in the intertidal zone, the area along the coast that is exposed to the air at low tide but is underwater at high tide. With the birds gone the snails, limpets and other invertabrates can graze on the seaweed almost stripping the shores bare and throwing the balance of the ecosystem out of whack. In conclusion where there were no rats there were more birds and alot more ground cover.


Such research has increased the effort to eradicate rats on islands they've infested with efforts being made already in Mexico and Anacapa Island off southern California.

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