Feb 04 2008
Rats get a bad rap
If any animal could benefit from a total image makeover, it’s got to be the rat.
There’s a bit of attention on them at the moment, this being the Year of the Rat, and the publicity of the festivities has caused quite a few Nervous Nellies to look more carefully around the compost bin.
But don’t mistake the Australian Water Rat, Hydromys chrysogaster, for one of the nasty introduced Black and Norwegian rats, which travel through the storm water drains and sewers and just love to get into your roof to spread disease. Our native rats are likeable little fellows and, like the platypus, most often glimpsed swimming on the surface of lakes or rivers in the early morning or evening.
Although generally similar to a platypus in terms of size and colour, the two species can be distinguished by a quick glance at either end of their body - if it has a duckbill, it’s a platypus, if it has a long furry tail with a distinctive white tip, you’re looking at a native Hydromy.
You can often see them out of the water too. There’s a water rat, or maybe a family of them, that live in the creek at the back of my cottage. They emerge to eat, and the one I see sits up holding his dinner in his forepaws, and on a few lucky occasions I’ve watched him run along the bank searching for food. At first sight, you would be forgiven for thinking he was a miniature otter, with his thick coat of soft fur, heavy whiskers and blunt muzzle. It’s lovely fur, once water rats were hunted to provide stylish coats for dim-witted ladies who never saw a creature in the wild, but they are protected now. The rats I mean, not the ladies.
My local creek must be in good health, for water rats eat all sorts of aquatic insects, fish, snails, frogs, and birds’ eggs. They will munch on water birds too, if they can catch them. Closer to the sea they go for crustaceans.
Better still, it looks as though they eat Cane Toads
Complaints have come from the Northern Territory where the local Water Rats litter swimming pool surrounds with the remains of Cane Toads that they had killed and eaten. A particularly interesting habit and one to be encouraged. As soon as Cane Toads slime into an area, native carnivores start disappearing shortly afterwards, owing to their habit of catching prey by grabbing them around the neck, right where the cane toad’s poison sacs are located. Somehow Water Rats are either immune to Cane Toad poison, or they have figured out a way to avoid coming into contact with the poison glands.
Because water rats have a short lifespan, and have endured many bad breeding years caused by the Drought, we have to be especially careful they don’t disappear altogether.
If you see a rat swimming in a creek, lake or river.. don’t scream and reach for your shotgun. Help preserve these lovely little native animals.
Like to shout me a cold beer?
