Six African rats completed their first trial working in the field in March, spending a month at a port in Tanzania where they were tasked with detecting smuggled goods.
Rats are seen in a street of New York, United States on October 19, 2022. New government statistics show that there have been 71% more reports of rat sightings in the city overall since this time in 2020. There were almost 21,000 reports by the end oAs an ambassador for rats, it’s never easy to win over the public. There’s that hairless tail after all.
But Runa at the San Diego Zoo is doing her best to counter the bad press. She is one of a handful of such so-called ambassadors showing off the virtues of rats at three U.S. zoos. The rats were provided by a Tanzania-based organization that is training African giant pouched rats to combat wildlife trafficking, detect diseases and perform other useful tasks.
At least twice the size of the common brown rats found in cities, African giant pouched rats like Runa areand other explosive material on old battlefields in Angola, Mozambique and Cambodia, earning them the nickname "hero-rats." Efforts are underway to expand the use of their keen sense of smell to finding people trapped in collapsed buildings, detecting diseases in laboratory samples and alerting officials to illegal goods at ports and airports.
Nicki Boyd, of the San Diego Zoo and Wildlife Alliance, said rats offer an important tool to combat wildlife trafficking, which the zoo wants to highlight since the illegal animal trade "is very destructive to the species that we are actively trying to save and protect in the wild."
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
A Birth and a Death—a Haunting of Igbo LandingA poet-anthropologist crafts her own African diasporic and Indigenous identity using a famous African story.
Read more »
Houston-area auto sales soared in March, while prices remain highHouston consumers sold nearly twice as many cars and trucks in March 2023 than March...
Read more »
Black Unemployment Rate Falls to Record Low in MarchThe Black unemployment rate hit a record low of 5% last month, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The news comes three years after the rate spiked to nearly 17% during the early months of the pandemic. BlackVoicesWTTW
Read more »
Silence is not an option in long march to pro-life AmericaThe Republican Party and the pro-life cause have recently enjoyed a series of victories in the judicial arena (Dobbs) and suffered a series of setbacks (the latest in Wisconsin) in the electoral arena.
Read more »
Home where Martin Luther King Jr. planned Selma march moving to MichiganStarting this year, the Jackson House will be dismantled piece-by-piece and trucked the more than 800 miles north to Dearborn, Michigan, where it will eventually be open to the public as part of the history museum. The project is expected to take up to three years.
Read more »