An Opportunity to Learn About Rats Before You Get Rid of Them
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Pest control is often engaged in without consideration for the pest. While it’s not necessarily wrong to do this, becoming aware of a pest in your home is a great opportunity to learn something new.
Rats, for example, have the same basic physiology as humans. They are mammals, after all. Starting from the outside and working in, let’s consider some of the functions of a rat’s physiology. You may learn something about your own body without even realizing it.
One of the first observations that can be made upon viewing a rat is its fur. Rats are covered in fur which affords them insulation and protection. The hairs trap air inside of them, acting like the thick walls of a thermos, and keeping the rat either cooler or warmer than its surroundings, depending on the climate. All that air that is trapped inside the hairs of the rat’s fur acts like a buffer zone, tempering the outside and inside air (air from the atmosphere and heat from the rat) so that not much heat is lost, and not much outside temperature is allowed to affect the rat’s core body temperature.
Beneath the fur is where the real fun begins. There are so many processes that take place within a rat’s body that are fascinating! To begin, consider the heart. Like a human heart in both structure and function, the rat’s heart pumps blood throughout the rat’s body. It is made up of four chambers, a left and right atrium, and a left and right ventricle. The blood enters the right atrium first, flowing in due to the negative pressure of the atrium coupled with the positive pressure produced by the both the heart’s pumping and skeletal muscle contraction. From the right atrium, the enters the right ventricle, and from there it is pumped into the pulmonary arteries to exchange the carbon dioxide it has picked up from the body with oxygen in the lungs. Once filled with oxygen, it returns to heart via the pulmonary veins, and enters the left atrium.
After traveling through the left atrium, the blood enters the left ventricle whose muscular walls are thicker and more powerful than those of the other chambers of the heart. Such strong muscles are required because the left ventricle is responsible for pumping the blood to the rest of the body. With great force, the left ventricle contracts, expelling its load of blood into the aorta and then into all of the arteries of the body. As it passes by body cells, the oxygen it carries is exchanged for carbon dioxide and other waste produced by the cells. The carbon dioxide is carried back to the heart and then to the lungs, and the process begins again.
Just below the heart and lungs is the liver. The liver of a rat is proportionally larger than the liver of a human. The function of the liver is to filter waste out of the blood, store energy, produce bile, and many other things. The liver’s many processes are vital for the proper functioning of the body. One of its processes, mentioned above, is to produce bile. Bile is a key chemical in the digestion of fats. When fat is present in the first part of the small intestine, bile is secreted into the small intestine. Bile emulsifies the fats, meaning that it breaks the large conglomerations of fat molecules up into smaller ones and keeps them from reforming. Because of this, digestive enzymes are able to work on the fats more efficiently, having a greater surface area to work with.
These are just three processes that go on inside the body of a rat. They are certainly not a reason to keep you from getting rid of rats that have entered into your home uninvited, but they are, nevertheless, fascinating facts. Now that you know more about rats, you can learn how to get rid of rats. One suggestion is rat trap bait.
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