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At last, we’ve reached the conclusion of this scintillating drama: the National Zoo’s naked mole-rat colony has chosen its queen. In case you’ve been living under a rock, let us catch you up: the Small Mammal House at the Smithsonian National Zoo is home to a colony of naked mole-rats, and for the last several months they’ve been engaged in a quiet—but brutal—battle for political supremacy. Naked mole-rats are one of just two eusocial mammalian species, which means they live much like colonies of bees or ants: one queen reigns supreme over everybody else, and challengers must fight and kill...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Furious tenants of a public housing project in the Bronx were pleading for help Monday, saying their buildings are overrun with rats — and they’re not kidding. They have the video to prove it. But we should warn you, the pictures are not for the squeamish. “I’m traumatized,” tenant Veronica Martinez told CBS2’s Marcia Kramer. You’d be traumatized, too, if you had the same kitchen as Martinez. Rats. An entire family of rats, some as big as cats, have taken over, hopping in the sink, into pots and pans. It’s absolutely gut wrenching. “I should never...

The Sun of a Beach Mouse If you own a house on the beach on Perdido Key you just got screwed to the wall by Escambia County in sunny Florida, sometimes referred to as LA (Lower Alabama). It’s a shame how the liberals have begun to pollute a once conservative enclave in Sunny Florida. Escambia County is proposing a non-ad valorem (NAV) levy on the rich residents of Perdido Key for the protection of the Perdido Key Beach Mouse. It’s basically a soak the rich levy and it’s illegal. They could use tax revenue but in Florida local governments have...

British households could be set for an invasion of super rats that are resistant to poison thanks to a genetic mutation dubbed L120Q. The mutation means toxins used to kill the rodents are ineffective and could potentially lead rats plaguing homes across the UK, with some scientists even fearing a population spike thanks to their immunity to poison.

As Italy struggles to deal with burgeoning populations of an introduced giant rodent, a mayor has come up with a novel solution – eat them. Coypu were introduced to Italy a century ago from their native South America to be farmed for their fur. But many escaped or were deliberately released after wearing fur fell out of fashion and the species is now thriving. They have fared particularly well in the flatlands of the Po valley in northern Italy, where farmers complain that they devour crops and destroy levees and embankments by digging burrows. Michele Marchi, the mayor of the...

It's been about a month since California wildlife officials started sounding the alarm on nutria, invasive South American rodents that look like enormous, 20-pound rats and have the power to devastate wetlands. They're making a comeback after being eradicated in the 1970s and have been spotted in Stanislaus, Fresno, Tuolumne and Merced counties so far. "We didn't know at first if it was a small, isolated population," California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman Peter Tira told the Chronicle in February. "But it became clear that it's a breeding population, and they're reaching major waterways where they can move." It...

A giant invasive rodent with the ability to destroy roads, levees and wetlands has been discovered in Stanislaus County. Weighing in at 20 pounds and measuring 2 feet, 6 inches long, plus a 12-inch tail, the nutria live in or near water. They're also incredibly destructive. “They burrow in dikes, and levees, and road beds, so they weaken infrastructure, (which is) problematic for flood control systems,” California Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Peter Tira said. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is sounding an alarm about the invasive nutria. When nutria aren’t burrowing, they’re eating. They can consume 25 percent...

REEDSPORT, Ore. (AP) - The man accused of shooting a snorkeler in the head told investigators that he mistook the swimmer for a large, water-dwelling rodent...

SKAGIT COUNTY - A rodent that can decimate crop land has just been discovered in Skagit County -- an area with an economy that depends on agriculture. It's called nutria and it is native to South America. They look like a beaver, but they are much more dangerous. The nutria is a rodent that lives in the water and feeds on the land. It stops nothing short of eating every kind of crop, plant, marsh or forest. Bottom line: they are an enemy to the environment and a nightmare to farmers. "They eat everything. They are hungry, they breed like...

Hurricane Katrina's path of destruction dealt at least a temporary setback to the nutria, the South American rodent species that is devouring wetlands along the Gulf of Mexico, according to experts. Scientists believe decades of wetlands loss in the Gulf region—due in part to the voracious appetites of the rodents—made Hurricane Katrina's destruction worse. "Some of the storm protection that nature provides from wetlands, especially in southeast Louisiana, that flood protection, it just wasn't there," said Justin Baker, a biologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries in New Iberia. Baker heads up a program to reduce the numbers...

Rat-Like Rodent May Be Coming to S.C. 1 hour, 41 minutes ago Strange News - AP COLUMBIA, S.C. - State wildlife officials are concerned that a large, rat-like rodent called nutria may soon be showing up in the Savannah and Pee Dee river basins. The furry bucktoothed rodent looks like a mix between a beaver and a rat and weighs up to 20 pounds. They have become a nuisance in other southern states because they eat marsh plants and dig through dams. Nutria reach sexual maturity within a year and quickly reproduce. They are enough of a problem in Louisiana...

The Nutria Are Here The scourge of Louisiana has found a happy home in Dallas' man-made lakes Nutria can survive in lakes where little else can, and they reproduce and look like rats—giant ones, anyway, with sharp orange buck teeth. BY CHERYL SMITH You know it's springtime in Dallas when the crepe myrtles begin to bloom, native wildflowers start their sprouting and the nutria waddle from their drainage pipes and sewers to frolic like kittens in the warm air. With their native land of Argentina too far away for swimming or travel by webbed foot, and a bounty on their...

Nutria — furry, swamp-dwelling rodents that look like 10-pound rats with webbed feet — are largely regarded as a nuisance in Louisiana's Cajun country. But they are wanted creatures nonetheless. Starting Wednesday, the state of Louisiana will pay a $4-a-tail bounty — officials prefer the term "incentive" — in hopes of wiping out 400,000 nutria this winter. The payment is part of an effort to save Louisiana's coast, which is disappearing at a rate of 35 square miles a year. Nutria, a non-native species that has overrun Gulf of Mexico wetlands since the value of their fur plummeted in the...

Ever See An Eagle Do The Breast Stroke? This footage was taken at MallardLakes subdivision in Baton Rouge .. Someone had shot a nutria, and it was floating dead in the water. I can't believe what this eagle did to bring that nutria in. I never saw an Eagle doing a breast-stroke before. http://www.youtube.com/embed/87xNpOYOlQ4?rel=0

NEW ORLEANS - A Louisiana woman is suing a Wal-Mart store over what she claims was a much-too-close encounter of the furry kind. Rebecca White says in her lawsuit that employees at a Wal-Mart in Abbeville let a rat-tailed rodent known as a nutria run loose and scare her. She says that not only did employees know it was in their store, but gave it a pet name, Norman, and failed to warn shoppers. White says she was pushing a full shopping cart down an aisle in October when the nutria ran out from behind a rack. She says she...

GALLIANO - They're killed by the thousands every year, their carcasses buried in the marsh. Their furry pelts, once sheared, dyed, made into coats and hats and sold on the international market, are now worth so little that some say it's more economical to cast them aside to rot. Nutria were imported to Louisiana from South America in the 1930s to supply a booming American fur industry. But they soon escaped into the wetlands where their population and their appetite for marsh-saving grasses exploded. Decades ago, their numbers were controlled by the hunters and trappers who worked the marshlands of...

For the small six-person team tasked with combating California's nutria infestation, a typical day consists of working in 100-degree weather, wading through marshes and avoiding traps built to catch 20-pound rodents, targeting about 2 million acres. Nutria, a destructive rat-like mammal, is currently burrowing into central California's wetlands. In the spring, the Department of Fish and Wildlife began to warn the public about the dangers of the animal, which devastate agricultural infrastructure by burrowing into levees, roadbeds and canal beds. But in the past few months, only 200 nutria have been exterminated, 100 of which were found in a pond...

Rats prefer the neighborhoods of Harlem, the Upper West Side, and Bedford-Stuyvesant — and they really like to party in the summer, a new study shows. Citywide, the rat population grew about 10 percent from 2016 to 2017 based on complaints filed to 311, the RentHop study released on Tuesday shows.

Trouble is, so do the rats in her neighborhood. They’re chewing through wires in her engine compartment, causing hundreds of dollars in damages. JoAnn and her husband Tracy live in Santee, Calif., just east of San Diego. Recently retired, they enjoy the open Every night, Joann's pours a little coyote piss around her tires. "I dot my driveway with some too," she says. She also places a Coyote urine-soaked sponge inside a tin pan near the car. She's not sure it's working yet and does not want to take her car in for any more repairs until she's rid of...

A giant 20-pound rodent with the ability to destroy roads, levees and wetlands has been discovered in Stanislaus County. A giant invasive rodent with the ability to destroy roads, levees and wetlands has been discovered in Stanislaus County.