Su suggerimento di @GiMa

I ratti diffondono le malattie, rovinano i raccolti, proliferano nelle fogne e nelle periferie delle nostre città, ma forse è stata trovata una soluzione ad un problema du convivenza plurisecolare: ne parla il Guardian in questo lungo articolo.

The rat’s primary survival skill, as a species, is its unnerving rate of reproduction. Female rats ovulate every four days, copulate dozens of times a day and remain fertile until they die. (Like humans, they have sex for pleasure as well as for procreation.) This is how you go from two to 15,000 in a single year. When poison or traps thin out a population, they mate faster until their numbers regenerate. Conversely, if you can keep them from mating, colonies collapse in weeks and do not rebound.

Solving the rat problem by putting them on the pill sounds ridiculous. Until recently no pharmaceutical product existed that could make rats infertile, and even if it had, there was still the question of how it could be administered. But if such a thing were to work, the impact could be historic. Rats would die off without the need for poison, radar or coyotes.

 

Immagine da pixabay.