A future dominated by giant rats?

[ScienceRocks]

A future dominated by giant rats?

New research predicts that rats will continue to grow and fill a 'significant chunk' of Earth's emptying ecospace. Their global influence is likely to grow in the future as larger mammals continue to become extinct.

Dr Jan Zalasiewicz, from the Department of Geology at the University of Leicester, suggests that we better get used to having rats around: "Rats are one of the best examples of a species that we have helped spread around the world, and that have successfully adapted to many of the new environments that they found themselves in.

"They are now on many, if not most, islands around the world – and once there, have proved extraordinarily hard to eradicate. They're often there for good, essentially. Once there, they have out-competed many native species and at times have driven them to extinction. As a result, ecospace is being emptied – and rats are in a good position to re-fill a significant chunk of it, in the mid- to far-geological future."

As rats fill the newly opened ecospace left in the wake of other extinct mammals, over time they, like many other species of animal, experience evolutionary adaptation. Gigantism can occur in animals as they adapt to their environment and Zalasiewicz believes that rats will prove to be no exception to this timeless rule.

"Animals will evolve, over time, into whatever designs will enable them to survive and to produce offspring," he continued. "For instance, in the Cretaceous Period, when the dinosaurs lived, there were mammals – but these were very small, rat and mouse-sized, because dinosaurs occupied the larger ecological niches.

A future dominated by giant rats?

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Global warming will kill the rats

 

[Jughead]

A future dominated by giant rats?

You'll wind up with Chinese restaurants on every street corner.

 

[rightwinger]

Rodents of Unusual Size (ROUS)?

I don't think they exist

 

[whitehall]

"Giganticism", another worry for the Henny Penny left.