When a tiny poof of a bird shows up at a backyard feeder in a snowstorm, people see perseverance. When ants band together to drag a large crumb, they see teamwork. When a delicate butterfly flaps into the sky, we feel hope. But when a rat escapes a trap or makes a home in a dumpster, what do we experience? It might well be disgust or dismay, but it’s rarely awe or wonder. 

Yet rats may be one of the most awe-worthy animals on the planet. They have survived global apocalypses, far-flung abandonments, and targeted eradication campaigns. According to Bobby Corrigan, an urban rodentologist of more than 30 years, trying to suppress a rat population is like trying to bail out the ocean. “Ever since the caveman days, we have tried to control rats,” he tells Big Think. “We poison them. We trap them. We do horrible things to these animals.” And just when we think we’ve won? “They rebound.”

No one wants to find rat droppings next to the Pop-Tarts in the pantry or hear the scritchings and scratchings of rats in the walls when they try to sleep at night. But the people who know rats best — even people who work to reduce and remove rat populations, like Corrigan — say that there’s much we can learn from these resilient animals. So, what do you say? Are you ready to embrace your inner rat? 

Tiny opportunists

Rats are rodents, a lineage of mammals that dates back to the days of the dinosaurs. That means that in a world of giant, dangerous predators, rat ancestors found ways to feed, breed, and endure. It also means that rodents persisted through the asteroid that set the world on fire and laid waste to 75% of living things on this planet.

But rodents haven’t just survived — they’ve thrived. Today, there are more species of rodents than any other mammal, including dozens of species of rat. The two most commonly found in urban areas are the black rat (Rattus rattus), which originated in India about 3,000 years ago, and the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), which hails from Mongolia and China and probably didn’t arrive in Europe until around the 1300s. Unlike birds, fish, or whales, rats can’t travel long distances on their own, and yet they can be found on six of the seven continents and even on islands hundreds of miles from the mainland. 

How do rats do it? “Rats are really great at pouncing on opportunity,” says Bethany Brookshire, a science journalist and author of Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. “Where there is new habitat, where there is new opportunity — say in human trade caravans or in urban environments — they’re going to get right on that.”

Part of what allows rats to colonize new terrain is their ability to feed on virtually anything. While lions eat almost exclusively meat and koalas can’t survive without eucalyptus, rats are what biologists call “opportunistic foragers” — they’ll eat whatever keeps them alive, be it stored grains, baby birds, or a piece of pizza left in the subway. “When push comes to shove, any kind of protein, whether it’s their sister, brother, or cousins … anything proteinaceous is going to be attacked, if they can get it,” says Corrigan.

This cosmopolitan attitude toward food allows rats to survive on ships and wherever those ships eventually land. This is why rats can be found living on far-flung, uninhabited islands, from the Aleutians to the sub-Antarctic. Conservationists are particularly perturbed by this rat capability because just a few of the rodents can upend an entire ecosystem if it lacks natural rat predators. But viewed through a different lens, this resilience — the ability to get dropped off on an island in the middle of the ocean with no supplies and no knowledge of your surroundings and be totally fine — is nothing short of extraordinary.

Sarah Soryal

Adapt and react

If you’ve ever felt unsatisfied with your lot in life, you might want to think about adopting more of a rat mindset. “One of the things I’ve learned from rats is to thrive where you are and not where you wish you were,” says Brookshire. 

For example, rats can be found in countless places that experience bitter winters. While many other species hibernate to survive the harsh season, rats consciously tough it out, and they can do this for two reasons. “When rats are cold, they just move closer to us, because we keep places warm,” says Brookshire. “Sewers are warm. Steam vents are warm. Rotting trash? Warm. Basements? Warm. … They need food, they need water, they need a place to stay. And after that, everything else is gravy.” 

If they can’t find human-made warmth, they can create their own by “hugger-muggering” — clumping together into large, basketball-sized sleep piles. “The rats all get in these very tight balls, almost like all the kids sleeping in grandma’s bed,” says Corrigan. “They can do that in ceilings, they can do that in walls, and they can do it in airplanes.” A rat’s body is built for finding and exploiting such spaces. Their faces taper down to a point and terminate in a very powerful nose. “That’s a really important design,” says Corrigan, “because they need to find spaces to get into, such as a crack in a tree or a split in the sidewalk.” 

When they encounter a structure, Corrigan says rats will run along the perimeter, probing it for weaknesses with their nose. “They work it in split seconds — probe, withdraw, probe, withdraw, boom, boom, boom.” Sensory hairs behind the nose help the rat determine which openings are big enough to exploit, and they do so extremely quickly — every second they are exposed raises their risk of being eaten by a hawk, snake, cat, or other predator. 

Rats also have relatively small clavicles, which are not attached to the sternum. “They can sort of collapse their shoulders, and that means they are limited in the holes they can fit in only by the size of their skull,” says Brookshire. “The average size of a rat’s skull is about the size of a quarter. So if you’ve got a hole the size of a quarter, congratulations! You can have a rat.” 

Never give up

The next time you feel like you’re trapped under the crushing weight of the world, think of rats. The species never says die — even when faced with deadly poison or a metal bar across its neck.

Warfarin — a drug used to prevent blood clots — was originally developed to kill rats, but most exterminators don’t use it anymore, says Brookshire, because rats evolved a genetic resistance to it. Now we have a line of second-generation anti-coagulants designed to kill rats that developed resistance to the first generation, and rats in some areas are already starting to develop resistance to it, too.

One reason rats are adept at shrugging off our poisons is that they are remarkably quick and prolific reproducers, which, unfortunately for them, is a major reason why scientists use (and kill) millions of them each year during research. A female can birth offspring every six to eight weeks, and each litter can contain around six to 12 babies. Most don’t survive, but if they all did, this would mean one pair of rats could hypothetically give rise to around half a billion descendents in just three years. For every rat that eats poison-laced bait and dies, others with genetic mutations power through. Those rats then reproduce, quickly creating a population resistant to that particular toxin. 

Rats have grit, versatility, compassion, and a mind-bogglingly long history of beating the odds.

Poison isn’t the only challenge rats rise to meet. “Rats also learn to avoid rat traps,” says Brookshire. “They are incredibly cognitively flexible.” A rat that has seen another rat get caught — or had a close call itself — will avoid similar traps in the future. Corrigan has personally seen evidence of rats surviving even the grisliest encounters with traps, as well as videos of rats pushing metal bars off their necks and surviving for months after losing limbs to traps. “It just goes to show you just how tough this animal is,” he says.

You might think rats must be grizzled individualists, prioritizing their own survival above all else, to overcome the many threats they face, but the rodents can be surprisingly social and compassionate. “There’s a great bunch of new research that has come out showing that rats will help fellow members of their species in a lab,” says Brookshire. “They’ll free them from traps and share food and treats with them. They will even actually try to revive them if they think they are unconscious.”

When scientists gave rats a choice between two doors — opening one helped a fellow rat in distress, while the other led to chocolate — the rats chose to help each other 50% to 80% of the time. “I think that shows there is resilience in being social,” says Brookshire. “They don’t understand kindness in the same way that humans do, but they still behave toward other members of their species in ways that we would interpret as compassionate and kind.”

Rats have grit, versatility, compassion, and a mind-bogglingly long history of beating the odds. If that combination of traits doesn’t inspire a little awe, perhaps the problem isn’t the rats — but our perception of them.