50 Fun Facts About Rats

Crows gather in a murder and geese in a gaggle, but a group of rats is known as a what?

A mischief is the usual collective noun for rats, although colony and horde are heard too. A scurry belongs to squirrels, a clowder to cats and a business to ferrets.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp found that rats give ultrasonic chirps, likened to laughter, when they are what?

Tickled rats let out 50-kHz chirps, far too high for human ears, and they make the same calls during rough-and-tumble play.

Magawa, an African giant pouched rat awarded a PDSA Gold Medal in 2020, was trained to sniff out what?

Landmines were Magawa's specialty: in five years in Cambodia he found 71 of them, and he was too light to set one off.

Which pizza-and-arcade chain got a rat mascot when Nolan Bushnell bought what he thought was a coyote costume?

Chuck E. Cheese opened in San Jose in 1977, a passion project of Atari founder Bushnell, and its rat was redrawn as a guitar-playing mouse in 2012.

Which reflex are rats physically unable to perform, one reason that poison baits work so well against them?

Vomiting is impossible for rats and other rodents, so a swallowed poison stays down. Many rat poisons even include an emetic, which protects other animals without sparing the rats.

In the Chinese zodiac legend of the Great Race, the Rat finished first after riding on the back of which animal?

The Ox carried the Rat on its back and was placed second in the twelve-year cycle, right behind its passenger.

Which singer's first solo US number one, Ben, was the theme song of a 1972 horror film about a boy's pet rat?

Michael Jackson was 14 when Ben topped the Billboard Hot 100, and the ballad sung to a rat went on to earn an Academy Award nomination.

Which country's wartime Special Operations Executive stuffed dead rats with explosives to blow up German boilers?

Britain's agents never used the rat bombs, because the Germans intercepted the first shipment. The hunt for more wasted so much enemy effort that the plan was judged a success.

Which Canadian province declared rats a pest in 1950 and has been famed ever since as essentially rat-free?

Alberta acted the moment rats advancing across the Prairies reached its eastern border, fearing plague and the loss of stored grain.

Which teeth of a rat never stop growing and must be worn down by constant chewing on hard materials?

Incisors grow throughout a rat's life, and because the enamel on the front outlasts the softer dentine behind, each one wears into a chisel edge.

In Pixar's Ratatouille, which rat with a brilliant sense of smell dreams of becoming a chef in Paris?

Remy cooks by hiding under a kitchen boy's hat and steering him like a marionette by the hair. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

In the Harry Potter series, Ron Weasley's pet rat Scabbers turns out to be which wizard in animal form?

Peter Pettigrew is unmasked in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, after a huge dog drags Ron and the rat into a tunnel beneath the Whomping Willow.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles learn ninjutsu from their adoptive father, a mutant rat known by which name?

Splinter began in the original comics as the unusually clever pet rat of a Japanese ninja named Hamato Yoshi.

In which George Orwell novel does Winston Smith face torture by rats, his worst fear, inside Room 101?

Nineteen Eighty-Four saves its rats for the final stage of Winston's re-education, when the threat makes him beg for the torture to be turned on his lover Julia instead.

According to legend, which German town hired a piper in 1284 to lure away its rats, then lost its children?

Hamelin's Rat Catcher's House carries an inscription dating the loss of 130 children to 26 June 1284, although the rats only joined the tale around 1559.

Which bloodsucking parasites of rats are traditionally blamed for passing bubonic plague to humans?

Fleas carry the plague bacterium in a blocked gut and regurgitate it into the next animal they bite, which is how it jumps from rats to humans.

Pet fancy rats and white laboratory rats were both bred from which wild species, also called the Norway rat?

Brown rat is the everyday name of Rattus norvegicus, which did not come from Norway at all: it is thought to have originated in northern China.

The Karni Mata Temple, where thousands of rats are revered, fed and allowed to run free, stands in which country?

India's Karni Mata Temple stands in Deshnoke, where the rats are called kabas and a glimpse of one of the few white ones counts as a special blessing.

Which Hindu god, worshipped as the remover of obstacles, is traditionally shown riding a rat or mouse?

Ganesha gained his rat late: his earliest images show no mount at all, and the animal began to appear at his feet in sculptures of the 7th century.

London rat-catcher Jack Black, who bred fancy rats to sell as pets, styled himself rat-catcher to which monarch?

Queen Victoria was the patron Jack Black claimed, and by breeding the oddly colored rats he caught, he helped turn a pest into a pet.

Male rats, like male rabbits, are known to breeders by which name?

Bucks are the males, does the unmated females and dams the mothers, while baby rats are called pups or kittens.

Which East African burrowing rodent, a rat in name only, lives in colonies ruled by a single breeding queen?

Naked mole-rat colonies run like beehives, with one queen breeding while the rest work, and the animals can live beyond 37 years, longer than any other rodent.

Which rodent of North America's deserts can go its whole life without drinking water?

Kangaroo rats can get all the water they need from the seeds they eat, and they save more by producing very concentrated urine.

A rat king, like the 32-rat specimen in a museum in Altenburg, is a group of rats bound together by what?

Their tails become knotted, perhaps stuck by sap, gum or hair, and the Altenburg rat king was found mummified in a miller's fireplace in 1828.

Scientists at the University of Richmond taught rats to do what in 2019, rewarding them with pieces of cereal?

To drive tiny cars, the 17 rats touched copper bars inside a clear plastic jar on wheels, and the task seemed to leave them more relaxed.

Which psychologist invented the chamber in which laboratory rats learn to press a lever for a food reward?

B. F. Skinner built the first one as a graduate student at Harvard, starting with rats before he moved on to pigeons.

Which psychologist taught the infant 'Little Albert' to fear a white rat by pairing it with a loud noise?

John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner struck a steel bar with a hammer whenever the baby touched the rat, and Albert was soon upset by a rabbit and a fur coat too.

The first maze used to test learning in rats, built by Willard Small, copied the hedge maze at which English palace?

Hampton Court's maze was suggested to Small by his adviser at Clark University, who reasoned that rats like to tunnel and can find their way home in the dark.

The 'Rat Park' experiments of the late 1970s gave rats a spacious, sociable home in order to study what?

Drug addiction looked different in Rat Park: rats in the roomy colony drank less morphine water than rats kept alone in small metal cages.

Which blood-thinning medicine, still widely prescribed to people, first went on sale in 1948 as a rat poison?

Warfarin takes its name from WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and grew out of a hunt for whatever in spoiled sweet clover hay was making cattle bleed.

Which horror film star voiced the rat villain Professor Ratigan in Disney's The Great Mouse Detective?

Vincent Price won the part after the filmmakers saw him in the comedy Champagne for Caesar, and his Ratigan hates being reminded that he is a rat.

The Muppets' Rizzo the Rat is named after Ratso Rizzo, the con man Dustin Hoffman played in which 1969 film?

Midnight Cowboy, in which Hoffman's ailing hustler is nicknamed Ratso, is the only X-rated film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Which Irish singer, later famous as the organizer of Live Aid, fronted the band the Boomtown Rats?

Bob Geldof took the band's name from the boyhood gang in Woody Guthrie's autobiography Bound for Glory, swapping it in midway through their first gig.

Ratty, the boat-loving riverbank hero of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, is really which animal?

A vole, to be exact the European water vole, is often informally called a water rat, though it only looks like one, so the riverbank's keenest rower is no true rat at all.

In which classic children's novel does a gluttonous barn rat named Templeton help to save a pig's life?

Charlotte's Web sends Templeton scavenging for scraps of print, such as a detergent ad, so that the spider has new words to weave above the pig.

Which French colonial city offered a bounty per rat in 1902, only for catchers to release rats alive to breed?

Hanoi paid one cent per rat, and the bounty was cancelled once officials saw that catchers were setting maimed rats free to produce more.

The 7th Armoured Division, the Desert Rats of World War II, took its nickname from a badge showing which rodent?

A jerboa, also known as a desert rat, was added to the division's insignia in early 1940 and gave the soldiers their nickname.

In the rat-baiting pits of 19th-century London, spectators bet on how fast which type of dog could kill rats?

A terrier cross named Billy became a London celebrity in the 1820s by killing 100 rats in six minutes and 25 seconds.

The charity APOPO trains African giant pouched rats in Tanzania to sniff out which lung disease in sputum samples?

Tuberculosis detection by rat was proven in principle in 2008, five years after a World Bank grant paid for the first research.

Contented pet rats often grind their teeth together, a habit that owners know by which name?

Bruxing is usually a sign of happiness, and when it gets vigorous a rat's eyes can bulge in and out, which owners call boggling.

Which former Disney animator directed The Secret of NIMH, a film about rats made intelligent in a laboratory?

Don Bluth quit Disney in 1979 with ten fellow animators to found his own studio, and The Secret of NIMH was his first feature film as director.

Which sub-Antarctic island, where Ernest Shackleton is buried, was declared free of rats in 2018?

South Georgia was cleared in a multiyear poisoning effort, and by the time it was declared rodent-free the numbers of its native pipit had clearly increased.

A BBC film crew found the giant Bosavi woolly rat in 2009 inside an extinct volcano crater in which country?

Papua New Guinea's Mount Bosavi crater had rarely been explored, and the 82 cm rat was one of more than 30 animal species the expedition found there.

Which Philadelphia research center bred the first rat strain developed for laboratory science, in 1906?

Wistar Institute rats were the first bred to be a standard research animal, at a time when laboratories mostly used the house mouse.

What is the scientific name for the whiskers that a rat sweeps back and forth to feel its surroundings?

Vibrissae get their name from the Latin for to vibrate, and the sweeping motion, called whisking, is among the fastest movements any mammal makes.

Which bacterial disease, called Weil's disease in its severe form, can reach people through water tainted by rat urine?

Leptospirosis is also nicknamed rat fever, and its severe form is named after Adolf Weil, the physician who first described the disease in 1886.

Which English horror writer made his name in 1974 with The Rats, a debut novel about mutant rats attacking London?

James Herbert got the idea while watching the classic film Dracula, during the scene in which Renfield describes a nightmare about hordes of rats.

The classic laboratory rat, with white fur and red eyes, owes its looks to which inherited condition?

Albinism in lab rats goes back to a single ancestor, a 2012 genetic study of 117 strains found, and the first such rat entered a laboratory in 1828.

Which clay animation studio co-produced Flushed Away, a film about a pet rat washed into London's sewers?

Aardman dropped its usual clay for computer animation on this film, because so much on-screen water could have damaged plasticine models.

Which bacterium, carried between rodents by their parasites, is the cause of bubonic plague?

Yersinia pestis honors Alexandre Yersin, who discovered it during an 1894 epidemic in Hong Kong, although it was known as Pasteurella pestis until 1944.