Rat outwits scientists, evades traps and dogs, swims 400m of open ocean to new land

[Derleth]

Your cat surrenders:

@CNN

A rat released on a deserted island off New Zealand outsmarted scientists and evaded traps, baits and sniffer dogs before being captured four months later on a neighboring island, researchers have said.

[snip]

Despite all their efforts, including fitting the rat with a radio collar, they couldn’t catch the crafty creature.

After 10 weeks on the island the rodent decided it had had enough. It swam 400 meters, the longest distance recorded for a rat across open sea, to another rat-free island where it was eventually captured in a trap baited with penguin meat several weeks later.

This was a bog-standard Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), the kind of animal that infests cities and granaries the world over. The article doesn’t mention any special training or breeding, but I doubt the rat had gotten any: The experiment was clearly about how to keep islands free of invading wild rats, hence the common breed.

This is probably the understatement of the year in biological circles:

“Our findings confirm that eliminating a single invading rat is disproportionately difficult,” James Russell and his colleagues said in a report in the science journal Nature.

The rat breed and the long swim make this song seem oddly approrpiate:

@Immigrant Song

We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.
The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!