Rat race: With complaints on rise, NYC redoubles efforts

October 18, 2015 by By Michael Balsamo

To many in New York City, the rats are winning.

The city's complaint hotline is on pace for a record year of rat calls, exceeding the more than 24,000 over each of the last two years. Blistering audits have faulted efforts to fight what one official called a "rat crisis." And even jaded New Yorkers were both disgusted and a little impressed by "Pizza Rat," the plucky rodent in a recent viral YouTube clip seen dragging a large cheese slice down a subway stairwell.

Nora Prentice, who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side, has repeatedly complained to the city about a colony of about 200 rats in a neighborhood park.

"It's like the Burning Man of rats," she said. "They're just sitting there in a lawn chair waiting for you. . I don't know what the city can do about this rat condominium. It's really gross."

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NYC Light Show Aims to Raise Awareness About Endangered Species

by Elizabeth Palermo, Associate Editor | July 30, 2015 04:51pm ET

Getting people to pay attention to a huge, global problem is easier when you have an enormous billboard at your disposal.

On Saturday (Aug. 1), New York's Empire State Building will be converted into a giant billboard to draw attention to the plight of endangered animals around the world. Images of the animals will be flashed onto a 375-foot by 186-foot (114 by 57 m) portion of the iconic building, equivalent to 33 floors of the building's façade.

From 9 p.m. to midnight EDT on Saturday, the Empire State Building's southern face will feature images of a snow leopard, a golden lion tamarin, a manta ray and many other creatures that could soon be wiped out in Earth's sixth mass extinction, according to Louie Psihoyos and Travis Threlkel, the organizers of the upcoming event.

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Junk Food Is Making NYC Ants More Like Humans

by Megan Gannon, News Editor | March 31, 2015 08:15pm ET

If you were in New York City recently and you saw a man sucking stuff off of the sidewalk with a weird contraption that resembled a water bong, you may have inadvertently witnessed serious biological fieldwork in action.

To study the diet of urban ants, Clint Penick, a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, went to Broadway, aspirator in hand, to collect specimens.

"Nobody ever talked to me," Penick said. "I basically was walking around and then crouching down on the ground and huffing something off the sidewalk through this ridiculous-looking device, and not a single New Yorker was like, 'Hey, what are you doing?' I guess I was not the weirdest person on the street."

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Disease-carrying fleas abound on New York City's rats

Date:

March 2, 2015

Source:

Cornell University

Summary:

In the first study of its kind since the 1920s, rats in New York City were found to carry a flea species capable of transmitting plague pathogens. Among them: 500-plus Oriental rat fleas, notorious for their role in transmitting the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death.

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Insects Clean Up 2,000 Pounds Of Food From NYC Streets Each Year

December 3, 2014

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

New York has a secret weapon when it comes to dealing with refuse on city streets, according to a new study: ants, spiders and insects that consume over one ton of discarded junk food annually along the Broadway/West Street corridor alone!

Dr. Elsa Youngsteadt, a research associate at North Carolina State University and lead author of a new paper published Tuesday in the journal Global Change Biology, said that she and her colleagues calculated that arthropods in that area alone devour over 2,100 pounds of waste products – equal to roughly 60,000 hot dogs – each year.

It could even be more than that, Dr. Youngsteadt explained. The researchers are assuming that the creatures take a break during the wintertime. Lest you think this is just a useless fun fact, the entomologist said in a statement that the research “highlights a very real service that these arthropods provide. They effectively dispose of our trash for us.”

She and her colleagues were working on a long-term study of urban insects when Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in 2012, and the following spring, they expanded their work to investigate if the storm had any effect on the behavior of those bug populations. The authors sampled arthropods in street medians and parks in Manhattan to measure the biodiversity at those sites, then set out to determine how much garbage they consumed.

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Invasive cockroach found in NYC can take the cold

NEW YORK (AP) — The High Line, a park that turned a dilapidated stretch of elevated railway on Manhattan's West Side into one of New York's newest tourist attractions, may have brought a different kind of visitor: a cockroach that can withstand harsh winter cold and never seen before in the U.S.

Rutgers University insect biologists Jessica Ware and Dominic Evangelista said the species Periplaneta japonica is well documented in Asia but was never confirmed in the United States until now. The scientists, whose findings were published in the Journal of Economic Entomology, say it is too soon to predict the impact but that there is probably little cause for concern.

"Because this species is very similar to cockroach species that already exist in the urban environment," Evangelista said, "they likely will compete with each other for space and for food."

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