Rat pasyuk: description, photo

2024 Author: Priscilla Miln | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 00:21

You are mistaken if you think that man dominates the Earth. For a long time, all continents, cities, villages and almost every corner of nature have been subjugated by a beast whose name is a pasyuk rat, or simply a gray one. Most of us can't stand them. And they are doing the right thing, because rats eat up a huge part of the crop, cripple domestic animals and birds, reward us with deadly ailments. But on the other hand, in laboratories, they give their lives by the thousands, helping us deal with diseases, including cancer and AIDS, testing the effects of toxins and new drugs on themselves, “working” on the secrets of genetics and psychology. Do you know how the pasyuk rat lives? How is he looking for a mate? How does the offspring grow? Why settles next to a person? We will tell you all the most interesting things about rats.

Where did they come from

12 thousand years ago gray rats lived only in East Asia. The ice age left them a small space where East China is now.

With warming, the pasyuk rat slowly occupied Altai, Primorye, Transbaikalia and southern China. But large-scale migrations occurred with the development of navigation. It was on the ships that the tailed animals moved to Europe, Australia,Africa, America, populating all settlements and suitable natural spaces. Now they are not only in Antarctica and in the Arctic. Since they arrived in new places on ships, even a certain John Berkenhout, an English naturalist, dubbed them Norwegian rats, thinking that schooners and boats come to England from there, and not knowing that at that time there were not a single rat in Norway. Despite the error, the species name Rattus norvegicus still exists today.

Pasyuk rat: description

Among their relatives, these rodents are considered large. Males grow up to 25 cm in length, plus a 19 cm bald tail. In this case, the weight of an adult is up to 400 grams. The size of females is slightly more modest. There are no other external differences. Pasyuk's muzzle is often not very elongated, the ears are small. The coat of rats is conditionally gray, but red, dark, brownish shades can also be present, approximately like agouti, which is why they are called brown abroad. Rarely, but there are pure black and pure white pasyuki. The abdomen of all is also white, and all over the body there are long guard hairs, often dark at the base. There are two subspecies of pasyukov - Indian and East Asian. Rats have a chromosome set of 42 units, and they have 25,000 genes, so all sorts of combinations are possible.

Behavior

The gray rat pasyuk is a social animal, in nature it lives in groups, loneliness is extremely rare. One family can occupy an area of up to 2 square km, which is carefully marked and protected. But if necessary, called "food extraction", the boundaries of the territory are easilyare expanding. A family can have from 100 to 2000 members. Among male rats, like other mammals, there is a strict hierarchy, consisting in the choice of females to prolong the genus. But there is no help and protection for each other. Rats are always on their own. They are very smart, have a good memory, if everything suits them, they are not aggressive, but they know how to stand up for themselves. Rats fight excellently, not only with relatives, but also with large animals. Previously, English sirs even staged spectacular rat-dog fights, which, fortunately, have already been banned.

Food

The pasyuk rat is an omnivore. In nature, her menu includes grains, vegetables, fruits and, of course, proteins: eggs, chicks, fish, seafood (stolen or thrown to the ground), insects, small rodents, sometimes even feces. Having settled near a person, the rats have somewhat changed their gourmet tastes. Now their menu includes any food leftovers, left unattended products (especially grain in granaries), as well as electrical wiring, books, and other things people need. An interesting fact: in order to get a tidbit, a rat is able to squeeze into a hole where its relatively small head could crawl through. Pasyuki have chosen for themselves warehouses, basements, subways, and in houses they freely travel through the sewer network and garbage chutes.

Reproduction

Simply fantastically prolific pasyuk rat! The photo above is of a 3 day old brood. These caudates become sexually mature as early as 3 months old! Females can have up to 20 cubs.pieces in a litter. Often 3-4 mothers arrange a common nest to take care of the babies. Scientists have noticed that in such cubes the bodies of newborns are sometimes intertwined, and it seems that the grown-up rat pups have two or three heads. Perhaps this became the prototype of the rat king from The Nutcracker.

In nature, animals build nests in hollows or dig shallow holes. In cities, they are arranged in any suitable place. A female who has been relieved of her burden can conceive again after 18 hours, and her pregnancy lasts only 24 days. Imagine the progression of the rat population!

Newborn rats are real crumbs weighing up to 5 grams. They can be eaten by a hungry father, and sometimes a mother, if it seems to her that the children are too weak. But mostly females are quite caring, they lick their tailed offspring, feed them with very nutritious milk, clean up the nest.

Until the age of 17, children remain blind, but already at the age of 1 month, and sometimes only at 21 days of age, they begin an independent life. Now there are about 15-18 billion rats on Earth, almost twice as many as us humans. And this despite the fact that the growth of their population is held back by diseases, predators, people and too short a lifespan, not exceeding three years even in the most ideal conditions.

Records

The pasyuk rat can surprise with its abilities. In case of danger, it jumps up to 80 cm in height, up to 1 meter in length, accelerates to 10 km / h, can swim in water for 3 days, and winds up to 17 km on land per day. Theseanimals, one might say, extreme. They can live and even breed at -18°C. So, in one of the meat freezers, rat nests with babies in frozen carcasses were found. They calmly tolerate heat up to + 45 ° C, and even radiation up to 300 roentgens per hour. Where atomic explosions were carried out and all living creatures were destroyed, only the Pasyuk rat remained unharmed. Their small ears are able to pick up the smallest noise in the 40kHz range. We pick up only up to 20 kHz, which is great for ultrasonic repellers.

But the eyesight of rats is rather weak. Their field of view is only 16°, so they often have to turn their heads around. Of the colors, they distinguish only bluish-green, and basically they see everything in gray colors.

Each individual needs only 20 grams of food per day, but for a year it is already 10 kg. Without food, rats can last only 4 days. It was the search for food that caused them to settle in new territories. Pasyuk need no less water. If their menu consists only of dry food, they can live only 5 days without drinking. If the food contains at least 50% moisture, they will last almost a month without water.

Harm and benefit

Rodents, living only in nature, annoy people a little. All they can do is nibble vegetables in the garden or grain in the fields. Pasyuk house rat is much more unpleasant. There are two varieties here - those who live with a person all the time, and those who move to people only in the cold. Both of them are capable of completely destroying food supplies, de-energizing dwellings and entire areas,gnaw through the wiring, eat the paws of poultry and rabbits, kill rabbits, chickens and other chicks. But the worst thing is that rats carry plague, typhus, Q fever, salmonellosis, helminths and other infections. For all these reasons, people are constantly fighting with pasyuki, poisoning them with poisons, setting traps.

But on the other hand, it is rats, due to their fantastic fertility, that are the main experimental animals on which medicines are tested, they conduct a bunch of experiments, infecting them with all sorts of diseases, in order to then find a cure for them. Therefore, despite the damage brought by the pasyuks, you need to have a share of respect for them.

Pets

It turns out that there are people who take great pleasure in dealing with rats and even saving them from trouble. One such community of rat lovers is called Felis Lynx (rats). "What happened to the pasyuk?" - This is one of the topics on their forums on the Internet. A community has been created so that everyone who wishes to have a rat at home can help with advice, because raising a rat is not so easy. There are people in the community who raise exclusively domesticated animals, which are more sociable, not at all aggressive, kind of small living lumps that require love and care. But there are people who undertake to go out with wild rats. Pasyuki also get used to captivity, with difficulty, but they are tamed, respond to the name, and can even allow themselves to play with them. But for example, males are more difficult to tolerate the appearance of a stranger in their cage, they can even bite it, at first they hardly tolerate cleaning the cageor bowls of food.

Selection

The great fecundity of rats helps to breed their numerous breeds. Basically, they differ in the color of the eyes and fur. There are even sphinx rats (bald), downy rats (with a delicate fluff instead of wool) and double rex (these areas on the body that are covered with fur change all their lives). A hybrid of a pasiuk and a decorative rat that has lost some of its former talents can also be obtained. This is done in the project "Home Pasyuk". Children from such a union are born not only of a variety of colors, but also stronger, more intelligent. True, sometimes this offspring comes out somewhat aggressive. In general, messing with rats is very interesting. They are affectionate, clean animals, eat little, are trained and take up very little space in the apartment.