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New York's Uptown Rats Are Genetically Distinct from Downtown Rats
- sigmaprimus 9y agoThis article made me laugh, I can't help but wonder if this is some kind of fake news story to promote a class based agenda. I guess it could be true but it seems very odd that these rats traveled all the way from Europe, made their way into the city from the docks, yet somehow decided to stay put for half a millennia once choosing a Manhattan burrough.
- gumby 9y agoThe article doesn't say anything like that at all. The rat "neighborhoods" do overlap, but not densely (think of the islands of wooded areas in a ski resort). In such a case it's not unreasonable to see speciation. (which is not described in this article, thus implying continued interbreeding.) You don't need a lot of territory for this to happen. The lice that specialize in humans have split into two distinct species: one for head hair and one for pubic hair. (and allegedly the latter is under threat).
- stan_rogers 9y agoHuman lice haven't split into two distinct species; the "human" lice - the ones that have been with us for as long as we've been around - are now head lice, and we picked up pubic lice from gorillas after we "lost" most of our body hair. (It's still there, of course, but not in a way that's useful to lice.)
- jermaustin1 9y agoIs there more on this? It sounds both interesting and gross, an intersection of two interested.
- detaro 9y agohttps://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070316-gorilla-lice_2.html https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070316-gori... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_louse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_louse
- saalweachter 9y ago> we picked up pubic lice from gorillas after we "lost" most of our body hair Can we, uhh, not mention this to any alien species we may encounter in the future?
- bdamm 9y agoWe should present it early in hopes that they never go out of quarantine.
- gumby 9y agoThank you, I had it mostly wrong. A quick whip through the Wikipedia claims that the pubic louse is indeed a descendent of a gorilla louse, though now utterly speciated from it and human-exclusive. Human head and body lice have indeed diverged, but are not completely speciated and can, in the lab, still interbreed. The term in the Wikipedia was "subspecies"; as I'm not a zoologist I'm not sure if it's a formal term or not. But my claim head/pubis claim was wrong. That's my TIL for today!
- sandworm101 9y ago>>> the latter is under threat. Can we get an endangered-species designation asap? I've shorted Gillet's stock.
- tradersam 9y agoWhat about that doesn’t make sense to you? Almost all species do that — humans included. Literally: Some families in New York City have been in the same burrough since their ancestor’s arrived from Europe. This can go for anywhere on Earth — a girl I once dated could trace her liniage back hundreds of years, mostly in a small town in Australia for centuries after her ancestor was taken there during British colonization.
- sandworm101 9y ago>> mostly in a small town in Australia for centuries after her ancestor was taken there during British colonization. Not that many centuries. Australia was colonized very recently. Go to placed like the middle east or china and families may have been in the same area for thousands of years.
- asveikau 9y agoI think you probably find some degree of that in Europe too until quite recently, notwithstanding some famous major wars and territorial shifts... It's an anecdote, but I was pretty impressed when my uncle recently signed up for one of those ancestry tests, and it correctly pinpointed exactly the region that his grandfather (my great-grandfather) had come from in the late 19th century. I'm certainly no expert in the genetics but it boggles my mind a bit that it's detectable that his recent lineage didn't stray much from that small area of Europe until it went to the States. I share 50% of my ancestry with him, the other 50% is from other parts of Europe, my wife is from another part with its complicated story, and we have kids... After 3 generations I don't think any one particular country should be particularly recognizable (though I'll admit, I may be over-simplifying or misunderstanding how it works). Yet my uncle's DNA test pinpointed a small place in Europe with only a few hundred thousand people, and did so correctly.
- sandworm101 9y agoBe very careful of those tests. Look at who is running them, often a particular church. Many have questioned their methodology. Not of the testing per se, but in how they selected their sample "representative" populations. They didn't do the science to determine whether a sample person was really representative, beyond some questionnaires. And their sampling was based on a particular world view, one that locked populations down circa 150 years ago into modern national boundaries and ignoring previous migrations.
- tomcam 9y agoObviously you haven’t been to Sheepshead Bay. Ba dum dum
- 0xfeba 9y agoThe rats didn't buy passage to America... They were just carried there. They are rather smart, but either way will do what they can to find food and mates, just like every other species.
- talyian 9y agoThere's this great book on a similar topic, "The Origin of Species," if you're interested in the phenomenon.
- hnarn 9y agoYou are what's wrong with the US.
- astrodust 9y agoYou're confusing "stay put" with "found a niche and a perpetual and abundant source of food". Many urban species have adapted to city living: Raccoons, skunks, pigeons and sparrows have all found their home and thrive on urban conditions where food is everywhere. A rat living in the city has it pretty good compared to those that have to forage in the wild. Slices of pizza regularly fall onto the subway tracks, for example, but this really doesn't happen in the middle of the forest. Nobody leaves huge dumpsters full of food scattered across the countryside, but they're literally on every single street corner in a city like New York.
- drharby 9y agoManhattan IS a burrough bub
- sigmaprimus 9y agoHmm from the response to my comment I did not articulate my point very well, I will try again, yes everything this article says is true but what is the point? Is it that DNA testing has become so accurate that it can now identify family blood lines? OK so yeah I'm genitically distinct from my neighbors, cousins, siblings....but who cares? Just because you can tell that a rat has a different set of genes than its brothers doesn't make a news story, unless you have a different adjenda in dividing a comunity, check out citylab dot Com with "politics" and then maybe you will get my original point.
- meggar 9y agoIsn’t there a Billy Joel song about this?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- joshuaheard 9y agoThat song popped into my head when I read the headline!
- throwawaymanbot 9y agoSharks Vs Jets...
- gadders 9y agoI guess a similar thing will happen with the various Orca ecotypes, given that they don't inter-breed: http://uk.whales.org/wdc-in-action/meet-different-types-of-orca http://uk.whales.org/wdc-in-action/meet-different-types-of-o...
- fblp 9y agoCan mods update this to link to the original article? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/rats-of-new-york/546959/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/rats-of-... I doubt The Atlantic would have given citylab permission to republish it like this.
- vwcx 9y agoThe Atlantic and citylab are the same company. Of course they are cross-posting.
- Gatellicited 9y agoSo that's two genetically isolated vermin to which New York is host, only this one's literal.
- sctb 9y agoPlease don't post like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- astrodust 9y ago> Rats, although abundant, are not easily fooled into traps. They’re wary of new objects. To entice them, the bait was a potent combination of peanut butter, bacon, and oats. They pulled out the big guns. Bacon!
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoUnless they plant to study them alive or release them when done (ha!) they could have just shot them. It would have been a far better use of everyone's time (and the money of whoever paid for the research) and allowed a more accurate sample of the rat populations as opposed to a sample of the rats that like bacon and don't hate new objects quite so much (the difference in samples is probably negligible but it's still something that must be accounted for). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat-shot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat-shot
- jinushaun 9y agoSitting around and waiting for rats to show up sounds like more of a waste of time. I can point you to several locations in my neighborhood where I know rats live because I see the tell tale signs, but 99% of the time I actually don't see a live rat scurrying about openly.
- klodolph 9y agoThat sounds you'd catch fewer rats per hour / per dollar.
- astrodust 9y agoI don't think the police would appreciate it if you started firing off guns in the middle of the city. It would be a far better use of everyone's time and money to just set traps. Are you thinking people would pitch tents and wait for rats to show up so they could shoot them? That seems harder than setting traps and checking in a day later.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago>I don't think the police would appreciate it if you started firing off guns in the middle of the city. We're talking on the order of a hammer on steel here. I was under the impression. trapping was happening indoors. Go somewhere you know there will be rats, pop a few, toss them in a bucket, wash rinse repeat. Depending on who the research is being done under it would only take a call to whatever department (probably something having to do with trash) you want the undergrads to tag along with for a shift to collect rats. >That seems harder than setting traps and checking in a day later. Going to where you know rats will be once to shoot them is easier than going twice to set and retrieve traps.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI wonder if this is true for other city species. Are there distinct raccoon populations? What about birds and cockroaches?
- sillypuddy 9y agoProbably true for humans, very few relationships cross 14th street.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI would have guessed a much stronger Hudson River divide.
- sillypuddy 9y agoDifferent species ;)
- greeneggs 9y agoBefore considering rats, this research group started by looking at white-footed mice. [1] > The mice have become so genetically distinct from one another that if you show Munshi-South a DNA sequence randomly selected from a white-footed mouse in NYC, he can tell you where it lives. At the same time, city mice as a whole also seem to be evolving new traits that mice from rural areas outside the city lack… [1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/uptown-mice-are-different-from-downtown-mice.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/uptown-mice-are... This is an older article, from when their first studies were coming out. [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26evolve.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26evolve.html Both articles also discuss other species, but it seems like the focus is usually on genetic differences between urban and rural populations, or polluted versus not polluted, and not on intra-urban genetic variations.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoYour quote stopped right where I started to get interested, so for the benefit of others: > At the same time, city mice as a whole also seem to be evolving new traits that mice from rural areas outside the city lack: genetic mutations that may help them neutralize toxic metals in polluted soil, for example, or speed up their sperm in response to the intense sexual competition in their overcrowded metropolitan homes. I wonder why they seem to be a little hedgy around the toxic-metal-mutation bit. I'm guessing they suspect that that's what the mutation does, but don't particularly want to feed the poor mice toxic-metal laden soil just to confirm.
- lalp1 9y agoNot rats but humans, very interesting : https://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/0143127160/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1512152139&sr=8-1&keywords=troublesome+inheritance https://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-H...
- alexozer 9y agoA few weeks ago there was a post about Crowded Cities, a startup trying to train crows to pick up and throw away cigarette butts in the city for a food reward. I'm sure it'd be harder, but could crows also be incentivized to somehow pick up rats? http://www.crowdedcities.com/ http://www.crowdedcities.com/
- eric_h 9y agoQuick googling suggests a rat is roughly half the weight of a crow - so I imagine it would be somewhat difficult for the crow to pick up anything other than baby rats.
- exolymph 9y agoIt would be amazing if they could get the crows to collaborate, e.g. two crows carrying away a rat. Probably impractical but I love the idea.
- tedmiston 9y agoOr a drone…
- pc2g4d 9y agoMaybe they should compare the city mouse and the country mouse next.
- nasredin 9y agoNo mention of the infamous Pizza Rat, the unofficial mascot of NYC? Or the Avocado Rat - Pizza Rat's hip cousin living in Williamsburg?
- starshadowx2 9y agoPizza Rat is mentioned in the first paragraph, with a link to a Buzzfeed article on it. "New York City is a place where rats climb out of toilets, bite babies in their cribs, crawl on sleeping commuters, take over a Taco Bell restaurant, and drag an entire slice of pizza down the subway stairs."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pvaldes 9y agoIs a matter of time that we'll start seeing rat hair as proof in the trials.