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Photo By: www.hawaii-forest.com
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Rats! Throughout Hawaii, as well as the entire Pacific, rats are everywhere. They stowed away centuries ago on ancient Polynesian canoes and later on European and American ships sailing to the Islands.
Today three species, the Norway rat, the Polynesian rat and the black rat, inhabit most islands. In cities, rats are one of Hawaii's biggest pest problems after ants and bed bugs, said Tim Lyons, director of the Hawaii Pest Control Association.
One rat was recently found making its home on a shelf under a client's Weber grill. It had been living on spilled tidbits and grease.
It's also best to keep landscaping trimmed back, Lyons said. Landscape that includes dense foliage over two feet in height provides natural hiding places for rats.
During the rainy season these nocturnal, disease-carrying scavengers often seek shelter in crawlspaces, rafters under floors, bathroom walls and attics where it's dry and dark with easy access to food and water. A rat can squeeze itself through a hole the size of a quarter and gnaw its way through wood.
On O'ahu, rats are common in sewers and in older neighborhoods from Hawaii Kai to Pearl City. And, they know there is food to be found wherever there are humans. A popular food sources is leftover dog food, but anything edible is fair game.
"All schools have rats," Lyons said. "It's just a matter of how many." Typically, cafeteria doors are left open and campus dumpsters left ajar, providing excellent hunting grounds for hungry rodents.
The best defense is sanitation, Lyons said. And get rid of the dog dish and even the water bowl.
If the problem persists, and over-the-counter rat poisons don't do the job, it may be time to call in a professional.
City dwellers may take care of a rodent problem with a simple phone call to a pest control expert. But what about rats we don't see? What damage are they doing?
Even the most remote ecosystems in Hawaii are under attack by rats that ravage native plants and animals. Polynesian rats were Hawaii's first invasive species, spreading out before even the earliest settlers, driving flora and fauna to extinction. The Norway and black rats introduced from Western ships added to the destruction of native species and spread human diseases, such as the plague and leptospirosis.
But are these invaders a problem that is out of sight, out of mind?
The natural environment is everybody's business in Hawaii. What we don't see, will hurt us.
Offshore islands, many of them Hawai'i State Seabird Sanctuaries, host thousands of magnificent seabirds. Rats attack nesting seabirds, their eggs and their fledglings, birds that include the wedge-tailed shearwater ('ua'u kani), brown booby ('a), Bulwer's petrel ('ou), white-tailed tropicbird (koa'e kea) and the red-tailed tropicbird (koe'a 'ula).
Rats feed on young plants and on seeds of rare and vulnerable native plants, such as lama tree, loulu palm and pua ala shrub.
Along the sea cliffs off the north shore of Molokai, and on several of its offshore islets, grow some of Hawaii's most diverse and intact coastal plant communities. Rats are a problem there as well.
"It is painful to see some of our rarest plants killed by rats stripping them of their bark or to come across rat-chewed tree snail shells on the forest floor and not be able to find any live ones in the trees," said Katie Swift, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist. "Rats are the silent killers of our forests. There are fewer and fewer native palm trees left in our forests because rats love the fruits and eat them before they have a chance to grow."
Hawaii has led the nation controlling rats to protect native plants and animals. The goal is the restoration of habitats and the recovery of species damaged by rats.
"We have three kinds of rats and none of them are native to Hawaii," said Chris Swenson, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "Even though we don't see them very often, rats are eating our native Hawaiian birds, plants and insects. Rats aren't the only problem, but if we're going to keep our native species with us into the future, we need to control the rats."
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