It’s been so cold that you’ve mostly holed up for a couple of weeks. When you ventured out, you weren’t wowed by the dining options. And maybe your romantic partner hasn’t been responsive.
Being a rat in New York City hasn’t been easy lately.
For people, that’s probably good news. When warm weather finally returns, there could be fewer rats darting in and out of parks, vacant lots and subway tunnels.
“I do believe this cold winter is going to lead to a decline in rat activity,” said Caroline H. Bragdon, an official in the city health department unit that handles pest complaints. But New York rats are tough and resilient, which is why Ms. Bragdon also said that the cold would not “eliminate rat activity.”
Jason Munshi-South, a professor of environmental science at Drexel University who has studied rats in New York City extensively, echoed her assessment. He does not expect “a major crash in the population,” he said, “but there will be some reduction.”
The weather will probably cause a “minor die-off,” with some rats freezing to death in their burrows, he said. And “when it’s this cold, they’re not going to be reproducing.”
The city says that a well-fed female rat can have as many as seven litters in a year. And Dr. Munshi-South acknowledged that rats in the subway “may keep on going if it maintains a decent temperature.”
“It does get cold down there,” he said, “but not as cold as outside.”
The snow itself, while it lasts, is actually a bit more hospitable, said Robert S. Voss, a curator in the Department of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History. Snow not only serves as insulation when rats crawl beneath it, but also provides protection from predators like hawks and owls.
Bobby Corrigan, a pest management consultant who describes himself as an “urban rodentologist,” said that young rats are most at risk when the temperature drops. “Rats have to have lots of protein and warm nests so the young don’t die of hypothermia when the parents are out foraging,” he said. “If there’s food, they’re going to be OK, just like you and me.”
Rats have survival techniques to make it through the winter, including what Dr. Corrigan called “food pantries” that they hollow out in their burrows and fill with goodies when food is plentiful. They also overeat as fall gives way to winter, instinctively bulking up to create a flabby layer that can help hold in body heat.
The Sanitation Department says that 311 calls about rat sightings have declined in each of 14 consecutive months, when compared with the same month from the previous year, for an overall drop of 21 percent.
The department credits what it calls a change in “rat-human interactions.” That mainly means the interactions between rats and garbage, after the city required businesses and many buildings to put trash in sealed bins instead of loose bags, depriving the rats of an easy food source on sidewalks and curbs. (The city’s rats had become so accustomed to foraging on the streets that they developed longer noses and shorter upper teeth than their ancestors in northern China and Siberia, according to a 2024 paper in the journal Science.)
More than 70 percent of the city’s trash is now destined for containers for pickup, and the department says it is chipping away at the other 30 percent with a pilot project that put 1,100 shared bins in a neighborhood in West Harlem. A district in Brooklyn — where a dozen schools are already putting their garbage in sealed bins — is scheduled to get similar bins later this year.
Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner at the Sanitation Department, said that so-called containerization would lead to “sustained generational change in the rat population.”
“A rat that’s less well fed will have fewer babies,” he said. “We say that if rats can’t feed, they can’t breed.”
Dr. Corrigan said it was no surprise that 311 calls about rats had decreased in the colder months. “People aren’t out on nights like this, sitting on stoops or picnicking,” she said, “so sightings that generate 311 calls drop.”
Former Mayor Eric Adams had an unusual relationship with rats, both calling them “Public Enemy No. 1” and fighting tickets for rat infestations at a townhouse he owns in Brooklyn. He also appointed a “rat czar,” Kathleen Corradi, in 2023. She said last March that New York had succeeded in “switching the narrative” on rats, and she resigned several months later. (Her LinkedIn page says she then became a senior vice president at the New York City Housing Authority.)
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has given no indication that he plans to name a new rat czar, and a query to City Hall this week went unanswered.
Still, Dr. Corrigan said, “the city’s compass for rat control is pointing in the right direction.” And Ms. Bragdon said that fewer properties in areas of high rat activity had been failing inspection.
“This decline started before the deep freeze,” she said. “The cold is going to help us continue.”
James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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