Abstract
ALTHOUGH the black rat (Rattus rattus) still predominates in the southern States, particularly in Florida and the States bordering the Gulf of Mexico, throughout the States in the temperate zone it has been displaced by the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), which appears to have been introduced about the beginning of the American Revolution, in 1775. NOW the rat population is enormous—in Texas some years ago 153,720 rat tails were collected in six weeks; in Georgia, Alabama and Texas during the typhus fever control campaign in 1934, it was estimated that 7,500,000 rats were destroyed on 747,608 premises treated, or approximately two rats for every person living on the premises. The total economic damage done by these pests is enormous. In the course of one of its inquiries, the Biological Survey received 14,650 replies from farmers co-operating in rat campaigns, and the annual losses therein reported averaged 35 dollars a farm, while a computation of the grand total of loss throughout the United States each year is 189 million dollars. In addition, rats are seriously concerned in the conveyance of certain diseases among human beings and domestic stock, and in an effort to arouse co-operative measures of rat-control, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has published an eighteen-page circular (No. 423, Jan. 1937) on "The House Rat".
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The House-Rat in the United States. Nature 140, 355 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/140355c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/140355c0