"There are foreign reports that an adult rat's IQ is equivalent to that of an 8-year-old child, which may be an exaggeration, but they are indeed very smart, a British scientist has studied rats all his life, and finally came to the conclusion that humans cannot eliminate mice, because rats are an excellent group, and the IQ is particularly high. When encountering danger or new food that has not been eaten, it is always the old, weak, sick and disabled to defy the law, if it is safe, the information will be passed on to other mice, if there is an accident, the death and injury are the old, weak and disabled, and it will not affect the strength of the rat colony; I think those rats are only smarter now than they used to be, and if we had simply poisoned them, we wouldn't have poisoned them all at the same time. It's just as unrealistic to use mouse traps and mouse glue. ”

In the conference room of the hotel, an old man with glasses explained common sense questions about rodent extermination to the evolutionaries present.

This time, Zhao Xinghua and Liang Hanba were also invited to attend the meeting, and it was the first time that the two had heard that there were cat-sized rats, and they were also in large numbers, which made them very interested.

"Rats are a very highly evolved organism, and the University of Jerusalem has published a "mouse bone tomography", which clearly shows the detailed features of the mouse bone structure, including the tiny bones. If the rat is scaled up and stretched out, the skeletal structure of the mouse is almost indistinguishable from that of a human except for the face, feet, and tail. Similarly, British and American scientists have concluded through research that the length of the genetic code chain in mice is almost the same as that of humans, with 2.5 billion pairs of nucleotides in mice, slightly less than the 2.9 billion pairs of nucleotides in humans. 80% of humans are genetically identical to mice, and 99% of humans are genetically very similar to mice. All of these indicators were not met by monkeys that were closer to humans in appearance. They have voluntarily entered human society since 10,000 years ago, and unlike cats, dogs, pigs and other domesticated animals of humans, they do not recognize the Lord, but choose the same way of symbiosis with humans. And the vast majority of rodents in the world are herbivores, these mice should have been originally, they became omnivorous after entering the symbiosis with human society, and cats, dogs, and pigs are different from their own initiative to change their diets, so their ability to adapt to evolution is very terrible. Even rats that live with humans are more numerous than their wild counterparts. ”

Another man in the room who looked like a teacher continued, adding to the old man's topic.

"How long do you think that food will last for them?"

Zhao Xinghua didn't want to continue to listen to the tricks of these old pedants, so he went straight to the topic.

"The average house rat eats about 9 kilograms of food a year, which has been counted, but because these rodents continue to grow two front teeth in the upper and lower jaws, they destroy and waste more food. The actual intake of food by house mice, including stored in the burrow**, can reach up to 25 kg. According to your descriptions, the rats in the granary are about five times the size of their original size, and ideally enough to feed two million giant rats for a year. Now it is impossible to estimate the exact number of those mice. ”

"Not so optimistic, under normal circumstances, each mouse excretes 15,000 times a year, urinates 6 liters, sheds hundreds of thousands of hairs, so in addition to coming to eat directly, the food contamination caused by rat urine and rat feces is 3 times that of its direct feeding, they like a shady environment, and all life behaviors will be completed in those granaries, so the food in the warehouse may be enough for them to eat is not much. They will soon be out looking for new sources of food. ”

The old man who spoke first retorted to the teacher-looking man.

If you don't get rid of them, even if there is a bumper harvest here, it will probably end up in the stomachs of these rats in the future. Ou Xiyi scratched his head and really couldn't think of a good way.

"There are many outbreaks of rats all over the world, but they are basically wild rats living on grassland farms. Before the end of the world, those rats would not attack other creatures, and still mostly ate grains and grass seeds as food. In the last century, there were many outbreaks of rat plagues in China's Inner Mongolia grasslands and individual areas in Xinjiang, with nearly 2 billion rats in the Dongting Lake area in 2007 and large-scale rat plagues in Australia in the 90s and 2011 respectively. They mostly start to give birth frequently when there is enough food in the grain harvest season or when the grassland grass seed yield is high, and the number can form an explosive surge in a short period of time. Now when they become aggressive, it really becomes a devastating disaster. ”

The old man continued with some lamentation.

"So how did these widespread rat plagues subside?"

When we hear that there have been so many rat plagues that broke out not long ago, then there must be a lot of experience for humans to learn from in defeating rats.

"It's nothing more than poisoning with medicine and using rat cages, but this is not the main reason for the elimination of several rat plagues, those rats are more like they regulate their numbers and self-extermination."

"Huh~?! How can it be! Did the rat commit suicide? ”

Everyone else in the room was amazed, it sounded ridiculous and incredible.

"There are many records of this kind of thing, in 1994 there were millions of rats in Xinjiang who committed suicide by throwing themselves into the river, and in 1998 the rat plague in Australia was also within 2-3 days, and almost all of those rats died suddenly, and the farmer just used a broom to put them together. The rat plague in the Inner Mongolia grassland also disappeared suddenly, and some people observed that those female rats later began to bite all their cubs to death, and then they no longer gave birth, and their living environment was far from the point of exhaustion, and when the food was still sufficient, they began to self-regulate the ecological density. ”

"That sounds incredible, doesn't it? Could it be that rats know more about natural balance than humans? ”

"Collective suicide of rodents is motivated by the need to protect species, as long as the rodent density in a certain area reaches a critical value, the population will be automatically regulated when it reaches a certain number of rodents, including reducing the reproduction rate and mass suicide. Obviously, this is a natural ecological balance factor at work. It is because in the long process of evolution, a law has gradually formed within it, when a large group of people brings them an existential crisis, the signals they receive will affect the physiological changes in the body, such as the pituitary gland, gonads, etc., resulting in a decline in fertility and reproduction, and large-scale collective suicide in a fixed way. This is the only "negative feedback" theory that can explain this phenomenon. ”

The old man continued.

"Does that mean those rats in the granary will kill themselves?"

"Nope! After they have eaten up the food there, they will soon migrate, maybe to Yancheng, maybe to the paper capital, it is certain that it is no longer possible to infer their behavioral standards by the living habits of ordinary rodents, they will stand at the top of the food chain, and this world will be their hunting ground. ”

The gray-haired old man's voice trembled with a trembling tone, uttering the worst guess in his heart.