4 Things About Rats

4 Things About Rats

Teeth

A rat's tooth enamel coating is more robust than platinum and can gnaw through glass, lead, cinder blocks, and aluminium with strong jaw muscles. The thickest layer is at the top of the tooth, especially for their molars.

Their jaw muscle connects to the eye sockets, which is why the eyes pulsate/'boggle' sometimes during the content kind of teeth chattering - teeth chattering is mostly a sign of agitation in rodents, but not necessarily for rats (at the very least it helps wear them down).

Smell

Similarly to hamsters and mice, rat sense of smell compensates for their lacklustre vision; they can discern different odours that are imperceptible to us due to their abundance of chemo-receptors, such as the difference between a door and its frame. As one of their primary senses, one sniff is a precise olfactory 'photo' of the world every fraction of a second. Potent smells can be too overloading at first - so understanding promotes their welfare.

They have a Jacobson's organ to identify odours by contact in a liquid state. Smelling urine helps identify gender, familiarity, social standing, maturity, cortisol e.t.c. in conspecifics. The aforementioned has culminated in police training for them to detect gunpowder and drugs - being even more talented than dogs.

Whiskers

Rats are tactile animals, a valuable adaptation for navigation since they are naturally nocturnal, with roughly 30 large whiskers accompanying dozens of smaller ones nearer the nose. They are comparable to our fingertips for collecting surrounding information pertaining identification of space, texture, patterns and paths, which intertwines with their episodic memory for route remembrance.

Their terrain is scanned by 'whisking' them using rapid facial muscle activity, potentially over 10 times a second. When next to or in contact with an object, the whiskers move less in order to hone in, adjusting them more precisely to establish the position for the next point of contact.

When a whisker clashes with an object, it bends in the attached follicle - stimulating the action potential to the brain for integration, which marks elements like the position and distance from said object, e.g. by how much the whisker bends.

Sociality

As intelligent social animals, they have apt for observational learning, a complex behaviour on the continuum. For example, rats can give in to peer pressure for validation, even if this entails eating or doing something undesirable they see others initiate, regardless of anecdotal experiences. They can also be altruistic to help another in their group - or sometimes strangers that are ill, injured or suffering.

Rats are cleaner than people think; the bubonic plague likely originated from lice on humans, not rats. They can spend hours grooming themselves and group members - domestic rats are actually less predisposed to parasite infestations than cats or dogs, though the same probably cannot be said for sewer rats.

By themselves, they can become depressed and lethargic, so they should at least be in pairs; or will need an intense bond with a human as a last resort. In particular, fancy rats are found most often in human proximity, are friendly and possibly the best at reading emotions. If given away, they never find solace and can die due to distress.