More than 80 percent of house mice sampled in New York City and other urban areas across the Northeast carry genetic mutations linked to resistance against rodenticide, the most commonly used class of rodent poison in the United States, according to a new Rutgers University study reported by NBC New York.
The study’s first author, Jin-Jia Yu, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Entomology at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. His team collected nearly 300 rats and mice from pest control companies in New York City and other urban areas across the Northeast and tested the animals for the relevant mutations.
“We found that resistance appears to be much more widespread in house mice than many people realized,” Yu said, according to NBC New York.
Rats in the same sample showed a lower rate: only about 30 percent carried the mutation. Yu’s team suspects behavior explains the gap. Rats are, as the researchers described them, “cautious and suspicious,” and they are less likely to eat food laced with poison in the first place. “Rats are very clever,” Yu said. “They will approach the novel food many times before they really take the food or the bait.”
The study grew out of years of conversations between Rutgers researchers and pest control workers who reported persistent problems with standard treatments. “Pest management professionals often told us that rodent control was becoming more difficult in some areas, even though they applied the effective rodenticides,” Yu said.
Yu’s team warns that as resistance spreads, less can stop rodents from carrying disease and parasites into homes.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily archive
