Is the "now the rats only eat rat" story from Skyfall plausible?

Factual Questions
1

In the James Bond film Skyfall, villain Raul Silva introduces himself by telling a story to Bond:

Silva: Hello, James. Welcome. Do you like the island? My grandmother had an island. Nothing to boast of. You could walk around it in an hour, but still it was, it was a paradise for us. One summer, we went for a visit and discovered the place had been infested with rats! They’d come on a fishing boat and gorged themselves on coconut. So how do you get rats off an island? Hmm? My grandmother showed me. We buried an oil drum and hinged the lid. Then we wired coconut to the lid as bait and the rats would come for the coconut, and…

[imitates metallic scuttering]

Silva: They would fall into the drum. And after a month, you have trapped all the rats, but what do you do then? Throw the drum into the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it and they begin to get hungry. And one by one…

[mimics rat munching sound]

Silva: They start eating each other, until there are only two left. The two survivors. And then what? Do you kill them? No. You take them and release them into the trees, but now they don’t eat coconut anymore. Now, they only eat rat. You have changed their nature. The two survivors. This is what she made us.

Is it theoretically possible to engineer animals into becoming cannibals in this way? Gruesome question, I know.

2

Behavior sink. Demonstrated in the famous “rat utopia” experiment. “Many [female rats] were unable to carry pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption…”

Here is the Wiki story:

3

Mixdenny has a good cite there, we did a similar experiment with mice at our college.

However, although the rats would get a taste for rat or meat in general, but that won’t over come their basic omnivorous DNA. Meat may those two rats preferred meal but where are they gonna get it? Remember, only two rats. So one rat kills and eats the other, then what? That survivor will eat coconut or whatever in order to survive. However, I don’t see the point in releasing those rats or not just dumping the entire drum into the ocean.

So yeah, rats will eat pretty much anything, including rat. And yes, we found that rodents might get a preference for meat, instead of rat chow, etc. But that does not change their DNA or anything. Pretty much, perhaps except on a very narrow and limited level, Lamarckianism, has been discredited.

4

Right- the last two rats might like rat meat, but the implication that they’re going to hunt down other rats and eat them rather than eat coconut is a mighty big stretch.

5

And, there are no other rats.

But sure, put those two and let them choose coconut vs meat, and they will likely go for the meat, but so?

6

Yes, the original story is that you’ve trapped ALL the rats, so if you monitor the situation and release them when only two are left:

  • One rat having developed a taste for meat kills the other and is left alone to subsist on cocoanuts. Only one rat is left on the island.
  • The two rats find it too difficult to battle each other and both subsist on cocoanuts. Only two rats are left on the island.
  • Unless - at least one rat is an impregnated female. Then all bets are off.
7

Well, not since those rats will grow up to eat whatever they can, and rat will be low on the menu.

The story is silly, to be honest.

8

I think the idea is, the two uber cannibal rats will eat any future rats that immigrate to the island, so you don’t have to worry about the island getting over run again - you’ve got two (presumably same-gender) rats that will subsist on coconuts for most of the year, but still eat any new rats that come in on future fishing boats.

Seems like it would be easier just to keep putting out fresh coconut-oil drum traps, since they’re apparently 100% effective.

9

I am curious as to what constitutes “sexual deviation” in a rat.

10

Yep.

And in fact those two might just do that- for maybe a year, until they died. Or lost a rat fight.

Screwing food items, homosexuality, necrophilia, etc. Homosexuality among young male rodents was common, in these experiments.

Of course we no longer consider Homosexuality to be sexual deviation in us humans.