Neal Phillip was biking through Canarsie Park on Saturday when something stopped him in his tracks: nearly a dozen bloated rat corpses, lying belly-up on a stretch of sand overlooking Jamaica Bay.
“When I saw the first one, I thought it was strange. Then I started seeing them all over the place,” recalled Philip, a professor of environmental science at Bronx Community College. “Seeing them dead like that wasn’t very pleasant.”
In recent days, similar displays of mass rodent death have
appeared elsewhere in the five boroughs, a grim outcome of the floods brought by Tropical Storm Ida. Experts believe that hundreds of thousands of rats may have perished in the deluge, amounting to one of the largest vermin depopulation events in decades.
“With this particular storm, any rats that were in the sewers were either crushed by the current or were swept out into the rivers,” said Bobby Corrigan, a longtime pest control expert and former rodentologist for the NYC Department of Health. “I can’t imagine they would’ve survived.”
While there are no reliable counts of New York City’s rats, estimates typically start in the many millions. A significant portion live in the subways and sewers, both of which were swiftly inundated during
last week’s historic rainfall.
he appearance of drowned rats in Canarsie Park, as well as
similar reports on the opposite side of Jamaica Bay, would suggest that many were carried by the city’s
combined sewer pipes. When that system is overwhelmed by heavy rain, its contents —
human waste and storm run-off, primarily; but also potentially rats — are discharged from outflows into local bays and estuaries.
Rats are adept swimmers. But many were likely overmatched by the sudden drenching, a record-breaking 3.15 inches of rain in a single hour. “I would guess hundreds of thousands died, easily,” Corrigan estimated, including “an entire generation of pups,” or rat babies.
Yet even as the local rat population has taken a major hit, close observers say that the city’s most reviled and indomitable species has, conversely, become more visible.
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