Can you crossbreed a Norway rat with a muskrat to get a carnivorous, tree cimbing, bird killing, mutant rat rampager?
I’m skeptical.
That story sounds a little over the top, what with the poison resistance and the “frequently attack people” line. I dunno if a fertile hybrid of a Norway Rat and a Muskrat is possible ( doubt it, they’re usually placed in separate subfamilies - muskrats are more closely related to voles and lemmings and why cross them with a Norway Rat to begin with? ), but frankly an ordinary, non-hybrid rat is perfectly capable of climbing, being destructive and being aggressive.
- Tamerlane
Very dubious. Muskrats have a ferocious reputation, and are larger than proper rats, which is probably how this story came about. Also the fact that they’re called rats (despite not being rats) means that an uneducated pest control person could jump to conclusions.
It’s amusing to imagine a 1.5kg muskrat copulating with a 0.5kg Norway rat, but it doesn’t seem likely. According to this webpage, Norway rats do not cross-breed with the genetically far closer roof rat.
I can’t find any references to interspecies breeding in rodents; maybe someone with access to more technical publications could do better, but I doubt they’ll find rat-muskrat crosses any more likely than rat-capybara.
As others have said, given that muskrats and true rats are fairly distantly related, the odds of them being able to produce a fertile hybrid are pretty remote.
Muskrats are not even native to Central Asia. They have been introduced in Europe, but I am not aware they have spread so far. So the “Uzbek specialist” would have had to import them.
In any case, muskrats are not noted for climbing trees. These critters sound much more like roof (or black) rats (Rattus rattus), which are slightly smaller but much more arboreal than the Norway (or gray or brown) rat (Rattus norvegicus).