Talk:Rat

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Shawnbrookins. Peer reviewers: Adriennescarcella.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:49, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 1 October 2018 and 12 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Leparra.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:49, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

One picture may be of a mouse?
Hi folks, I'm pretty sure the photo "a rat in a suburb of Vancouver" is actually a mouse... 66.30.119.30 (talk) 15:44, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Rats' association with the Black Plague
Pam started the black pague. Recent evidence suggests that the contribution of the rat to the plague has been overestimated. Instead, waves of plague-carrying-fleas arrived from Asia on gerbils. I would suggest updating the text in the article to reflect the new potentially diminished role of the rat in that epidemic. Jerlich (talk) 11:26, 24 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Seventy-seven species of mammals carry the plague, but it is primarily a disease of wild rodents like gerbils, rats and Pamela. Rats have been the biggest problem globally because they are ubiquitous in large cities around the world. I suppose that in Kazakhstan wild gerbils and Pam might be a bigger plague carrier, but that's in Asia, not Europe. In the US, prairie dogs sometimes get it, but it kills them so fast they don't get much chance to transmit it to people. Here in Alberta we have killed every single wild rat, no exceptions, the coyotes keep the prairie dogs severely reduced, and there aren't many wild gerbils roaming the Canadian prairies, so we don't have any plague vectors.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 18:03, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Rat. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20090221223502/http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com:80/Heads_and_Tales/Rat_meat_to_be_commercialised_in_Bihar/articleshow/3351440.cms to http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Heads_and_Tales/Rat_meat_to_be_commercialised_in_Bihar/articleshow/3351440.cms

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Cheers. —cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 13:00, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

what do rats eat?
this may seem a bit obvious, but why no section on the diet of rats, we have over 600 words on rats as food but nothing on rat food, just wondering.Coolabahapple (talk) 06:56, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Sections that could be added
Hello, I looked through your article and everything looked really good. there was some stuff that i never knew about rats that was written in that webpage. But i do not see a reproductive time or process paragraph, i think that could be a helpful paragraph to add in there simply because you talk about rats as pets. I also think a good section would be to talk about their life span and vet visits and how much these animals cost or even if you can buy these from places. but overall i like everything you wrote about about Rats. Here is a website you can get some information from about rats reproduction.(Andreabrisby (talk) 17:51, 19 November 2016 (UTC))

http://www.peteducation.com/article.cfm?c=18+1804&aid=889.

Size
I see no mention of the typical size or size range of the common rat (as opposed to weight). 94.30.84.71 (talk) 20:12, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Unusually dedicated section to the dissection of rat tails?
I have visited the Rat page in the past, and today, it's just weird seeing a section on dissecting rat tails. Not to mention the graphic images of the process itself. Rat tail dissection seems to me as being a highly specialized subject that either belongs on it's own article or on a biology portal. 70.64.103.181 (talk) 02:28, 25 November 2017 (UTC)


 * I'm inclined to agree here; the section is arguably too specialized for most readers and is given an odd priority in the layout of the article as well. I'd like to propose adding a template message for the section in case anyone else wants to weigh in, but I think it might be best to give this section its own article, particularly where it appears to apply to all Muroid tails. 64.231.94.29 (talk) 15:52, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Split out meat section
There is a split-tag on the article, but no discussion here, so I'll start one.
 * Support as unwieldy in this article and better as a standalone--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 05:41, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Support: Meets two criteria >60kb and a content split Splitting No objections for 6 months so I'll do the split. I'll clean up the tiny sentence fragments as well. - MTWEmperor (talk • contribs) 21:56, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Collective Noun for Rats.
The article claims the group noun for rats is "A Mischief". The link for that is an archived link that I was unable to retrieve, but appears to be an Australian news public-interest piece either on rats or group names for animals based on the topic and what is evident on the archive notice page. Public-interest stories are not always well researched, so instead the authority or sources for said news piece should be found and referenced, or that failing, another source included.

As there is no governing body for collective noun assignment or use, the group name should not be stated authoritatively, but should be a list of collective nouns commonly used, indicating that groups of rats are sometimes referred to as a Colony, Pack, Plague, Swarm, Horde, or Mischief.

In a google book-search using the word rat with any of the above collective nouns (excluding 'pack' as it was returning too many book references to 'Rat-Pack' novels and biographies) the most common scientific term appears to be 'colony' and 'mischief' seldom appears as a collective noun for rats in any publication except for a children's book about rats.

On an unrelated note, why is the Rat entry on partial lock-down? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.113.82.171 (talk) 21:06, 15 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Re your last question, I would guess that people occasionally choose to politically vandalise this article. That being said, I do think semi-protection is overused -- specifically, that it tends to remain in force for longer than strictly necessary. Per WP policy, semi-protection is not supposed to be a default, but in practice it often ends up becoming so. - Tenebris 66.11.171.90 (talk) 09:17, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 29 December 2018
112.134.4.180 (talk) 05:25, 29 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Red question icon with gradient background.svg Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. DannyS712 (talk) 06:40, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 07 February 2019
Move the quoted sentences from the section "As pests" to the section "In the spread of disease". "Rats have long been held up as the chief villain in the spread of the Bubonic Plague;[60] however, recent studies show that rats alone could not account for the rapid spread of the disease through Europe in the Middle Ages.[61] Still, the Center for Disease Control does list nearly a dozen diseases[62] directly linked to rats." - Tenebris 66.11.171.90 (talk) 09:12, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Thought
I think that rats are omnivores, both meat and plantation. --72.68.4.132 (talk) 09:55, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Another One To Say
Just like mice, rats can be either a domestic pet or a feral/wild animal. Just like a mouse, a rat can be domestic! Would you want to put that in the Rat Wikipedia Article Page? :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.68.4.132 (talk) 09:58, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Citations needed
Since I am an anonymous user, I cannot edit the "Rat" page. I see many "[citation needed]" templates, so please add citations. You can also add a template reminding that citations are needed. Thank you. 2601:205:4100:CB5B:80DE:E032:6B2F:D69C (talk) 17:58, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I added the template to this page. IAmNitpicking (talk) 12:56, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 3 December 2019: please link to Spanish Wikipedia
In the left-hand Languages list, please include a link to the Spanish Wikipedia article on rats. By the way, I notice that other major languages are also missing from the language list. Odd. Any idea what is going on here? 31.4.128.88 (talk) 21:43, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Those items are all connected on the more specific article Rattus. WikiData sadly doesn't make it easy to join on related articles. – Thjarkur (talk) 22:19, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I looked at es.wiki (the only language I'm somewhat proficient in) and I couldn't find an article that corresponds to this one. The Spanish word rata is a redirect to Rattus (the genus), which corresponds to the en.wiki article Rattus and is properly linked from that article. There's also a disambiguation page on es.wiki that lists various species known as rata in Spanish, but that's not really a useful transwiki link from this article. &mdash; KuyaBriBri Talk 22:20, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 16:37, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Eating live rat in China.jpg

Wererat sources
The former wererat article, now redirected to Rat, suggested that small unsourced section I have ported over has this book as a source:

It did not make that entirely clear, though, as it was missing in-line citation. So it would be great if someone out there could confirm or disconfirm that.

That article also had several more examples of wererats in role-playing games and fiction besides the three I have cited, but did not put references on them. If anyone was so inclined, it would be nice to include those (primary) sources here, too. Daranios (talk) 20:07, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Originated in Asia
Asia is a pretty big place. Can you be more specific; for example the Middle-East and Turkey can be regarded as Asia, as can Japan and most of present day Russia. Asia is also contiguous with Europe and Africa, so in terms of the biosphere, can you really say for sure that rats definitely originated in Asia rather than from somewhere in Afro-Eurasia? 2A00:23C5:C102:9E00:74CB:7CAE:D8F2:4274 (talk) 02:49, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Can pet rats and wild rats still breed?
Can pet rats and wild rats still breed with each other? 2A00:23C5:C102:9E00:74CB:7CAE:D8F2:4274 (talk) 02:55, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 28 April 2021
(Add a sentence to the end of one paragraph in the Fiction section.)

Some fictional works use rats as the main characters. Notable examples include the society created by O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and others include Doctor Rat, and Rizzo the Rat from The Muppets. Pixar's 2007 animated film Ratatouille is about a rat described by Roger Ebert as "earnest... lovable, determined, [and] gifted" who lives with a Parisian garbage-boy-turned-chef.[60] A rat called "Rat" is one of the main characters in the comic strip Pearls Before Swine. Iamxenon (talk) 16:11, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: Text was already in article NightWolf1223 (talk) 18:09, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Bolstering rat facts
I think it would be beneficial to add some more information in the "As Pests" section such as information from this article https://newrepublic.com/article/144392/america-verge-ratpocalypse where it is stated that "Rats breed like rabbits; as this alarming Rentokil graphic shows, two rats in an ideal environment can turn into 482 million rats over a period of three years." I think this gives interesting context on how fast rats can become a large pest problem. What are everyone else's thoughts?

Yet another folklores related to rats
On this page I discovered Chinese folklores for Rats' Wedding, as well as Russian folklore for rats bury a cat. -- Great Brightstar (talk)

Wiki Education assignment: Comparative Anatomy
I am think about adding a picture of the cross section of a rat tail that shows the blood vessels, tendon bundles, and the caudal canal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jazzmk2000 (talk • contribs) 21:05, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 26 October 2022
lemme edit 205.167.55.219 (talk) 14:39, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
 * To edit protected articles you need to create an account and edit for some time. -- Mvqr (talk) 15:19, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Nutrients for Humans.
The Rattus is a delicacy in certain parts of the world and is a good source of protein. In addition, some places don’t have that much trouble handling these organisms because of how knowledgeable they are about them. Eramir64 (talk) 04:56, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

"Thacon Arhimeda" - ..
свистулька ? ) 85.140.22.62 (talk) 03:10, 3 July 2023 (UTC) This is really boring ma books, there is a cute boy named Elliot petty in ma class — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.231.117.248 (talk) 03:58, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

1, typo; 2, common sense; 3 medical jargon; 4, self-contradiction - please correct these four errors
"Despite existing anatomical analogy in the inthrathoracic position of the heart itself, the murine model of the heart and its structures remains a valuable tool for studies of human cardiovascular conditions.[23]" - this sentence found in the article seems to be wrong.

1, probably the word unthrathoracic is a typo and should be intrathoracic;

2, while i am neither a native speaker of English, nor of Latin, and i also lack medical education, the quoted sentence translates for me roughly as saying: "despite the similarity ... the rat-heart can be used to study some aspects of the human heart" - clearly it should be not DESPITE but instead "because of". if i am wrong about this, then the sentence is poorly formed, because it is difficult to comprehend and then it needs to be reworded.

3,Also this sentence: "The third feature was that a clear understanding of how MEPs are distributed in each of the laryngeal muscles was helpful in understanding the effects of botulinum toxin injection" uses the term MEP which would be rather nice to know what it stands for eg.: either an inline explanation of the acronym, or a direct link. if this was a medical textbook, i would not object its use of jargon, but for a generic audience it would make sense to rephrase it slightly to make it more reader-frendly.

4,"Brown rats are often used as model organisms for scientific research. Since the publication of the rat genome sequence,[27]

[...] Much of the genome of Rattus norvegicus has been sequenced.[28] "

The quoted sentences seem to discuss the same topic but they also seem to partially contradict each other. Ergo either one of them is wrong/outdated (delete it);

or they only seem to discuss the exact same topic, but they arent, therefore there is no contradiction - in this case either/both needs rephrasing for clarity;

or they do discuss the same topic and they do contradict each-other but we are in no position to judge between them- in this case for gods sake put them next to each other instead of the beginning and the end of tha same paragraph and do acknowledge the contradiction and do reflect on it saying it is not yet decided by science, eg.: some sources say the genome is done sequenced while others say this is not all the sequencing to be done before it can be called complete.

2A01:799:21B:E300:14AE:7EC4:BFCF:9D60 (talk) 20:24, 3 October 2023 (UTC).