When people met rats, it's hard to say. It seems that they have always been with a person. The black rat lived in the cities and provinces of Europe, in Central Asia, for example, the Turkestan.
And regardless of the name, rats ate and spoiled human reserves (mainly of plant origin), supported the life of an army of fleas, served as an object of hunting for cats and dogs. No one, of course, was happy with them, but still people treated their presence as a habitual evil.
And suddenly, in the first half of the 18th century in Europe, in one city after another, other rats began to appear - noticeably larger, reddish-gray in color, impudent, cunning, nosy. They drove out or even simply killed the black aborigines and multiplied rapidly, capturing territory after territory. They did not refuse grain and vegetables, but much more willingly devoured meat, sausage, bacon, stole eggs, killed chickens, newborn pigs and lambs. On occasion, they did not disdain human flesh: they could attack small children left unattended or chew on the face of the deceased (especially during epidemics or other disasters, when corpses often lay in the streets). And finding themselves in a dead end, they desperately rushed at the pursuer, putting to flight not only cats, but also people: it was then that the expression "fights like a rat cornered" arose among many peoples.
Where the terrible aliens came from, no one knew, but it was noticed that in every country their distribution begins with port cities. And when, in 1769, the English naturalist John Berkenhout finally described a new species of rodents according to all the rules of biological taxonomy (just standardized by Carl Linnaeus), he, like many, concluded that the pasuk entered the country with Norwegian ships. Based on this, the animal was named Rattus norvegicus - "Norwegian rat".
Now, of course, it is clear that Berkenhout was wrong: the first evidence of a gray rat in England dates back to 1728, when they were not yet in Norway. Most likely, the pasuk came to the British Isles from Denmark. However, there is no reason to call him a "Danish rat" either - his homeland, according to modern scientists, is located in a completely different part of the world: in Eastern China. And the time of occurrence of this species is attributed to the ice age. No, do not think that Pasyuk was born in ice. Quite the opposite - glaciation did not reach Eastern China. And here, between the sea, southern mountains, western deserts and a frozen glacier (more precisely, the cold steppes lying in front of it), there is a small island of a warm and humid climate, where a large "invincible" rodent, capable of feeding on anything, has formed and still lives.but preferring meat food.
In nature, the pasyuk, or gray rat, lives near the water, preferring gentle banks with soft soil, where you can dig a long (up to 5 meters) burrow. When, in a flood, this shelter floods, the rats move to the hollows, and if they are not there, then they build temporary nests on the nearest trees. They are not afraid of water at all, they swim and dive perfectly (there are small swimming membranes on the hind legs of animals), they get food in the water - mollusks, swimming beetles, frogs, and, on occasion, fish. In general, a rat attacks any prey, from insects to a pigeon and a water vole, which is not inferior in size to a pike (it is not for nothing that the vole is better known as the "water rat"). But the latter greatly loses to him in intelligence and dexterity.
Pasyuk usually live in large groups, sometimes in colonies, zealously defending their ancestral territory from strangers. At the same time, family members do not distinguish between their numerous brothers "by portrait". And the point here is not a bad memory - when solving the problem of passing the maze, the pasyuk can keep in his head a more difficult route than a person. The rat identifies "friends" and "aliens" by smell: all members of the colony are blood relatives, constantly maintaining bodily contact with each other, their smell has a common component. Everything else does not matter: if you hold the pike on a mat left over from a stranger's group, and then release it to relatives, they will tear it apart, smelling a foreign smell. Needless to say, the same fate awaits the true outsider.
Within the group, violent clashes are also not uncommon, although there are almost no deaths in them. By the way, their fights are stimulated by nature itself: males have an interesting physiological mechanism - after each successful brawl, the winner rat grows up a little and gains weight (in principle, pasyuk are able to grow all their lives). And since the outcome of a duel depends primarily on the ratio of the size of the fighters, the most successful fighters grow until those who want to measure their strength are transferred. Such champions become dominants and fathers of most of the rats in the group.
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In general, many animals will envy the stamina and vitality of the pike. Throughout their long history, rats have indeed proven to be one of the most tenacious.
Their spread around the world began with the melting of the glacier, when the borders of the rat "reserve" in Eastern China began to move apart and new territories opened up for rodents. For a long time, due to their attachment to water, they moved very slowly: in 13 thousand years of walking expansion, the animals reached only Altai, Transbaikalia and Primorye. A special subspecies of Rattus norvegicus caraco, the original aboriginal form of the gray rat, still lives in these places (as well as in Sakhalin, the Southern Kuriles and in Japan).
But everything changed when ships built by people sailed along the rivers and seas. They carried grain, oil, skins, food supplies for the crew … and rats. By that time, the Pasyuk had already perfectly adapted to life in the houses and barns of a person, and from there they easily stepped on board the ship. Around the turn of our era, the gray rat appeared in India, during the Middle Ages it mastered the ports of the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and East Africa. And after Vasco da Gama found the sea route to India, the conquest of Europe was only a matter of time for the rats. For the time being, their forward detachments were concentrated only in port cities, in order to launch a decisive offensive at the beginning of the 18th century. And at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, the pasiuk became the dominant species in all European countries.
In the 1770s, gray rats penetrated America, then Australia, New Zealand, West Africa … The conquest of the planet continued in the 20th century: in the 1940s, the pasuk entered the cities of Central Asia and South Siberia (Barnaul was inhabited by animals in five years, they multiplied at about the same rate in Tashkent). In the 1950s, they first appeared in the Canadian province of Alberta, in the 1980s they broke through to Tajikistan and the Fergana Valley. At the moment, there are still quite large areas on Earth, where the pasukas have not reached, but, probably, only Antarctica, uninhabited areas of the Arctic, and also some islands will soon remain free of them.
However, this conquest is rather arbitrary: in most places rats do not settle throughout the territory, but keep close to humans. And only in places with a warm climate (for example, in the Transcaucasus) do rodents sometimes return to nature, creating colonial towns along the banks of water bodies. In our area, such colonies exist in the regime of summer cottages - they are inhabited only in the warm part of the year, for the winter rats go to human housing. They are not afraid of the cold, but the inability to feed themselves: where there is enough food, the Pasyuk calmly endures the most severe frosts. At meat processing plants, rats were repeatedly found in freezers: they lived inside frozen carcasses, ate only meat, and females built nests from fluffed veins and gave birth to cubs in them - at a temperature of -18 degrees!
It is clear that an animal capable of surviving in such conditions easily assimilates any urban habitat. True, the pasyuk are uncomfortable at a height: after 8 - 9 floors they usually do not meet. (Therefore, in some cities they captured, populations of the black rat survived on the upper floors.) But basements and any communications - from metro lines to electric cables - are just their native element. Thanks to their craving for water, they have chosen the sewer system, where no urban rodents live anymore. All sorts of campaigns for the extermination of Pasyukov allow, at best, to temporarily reduce their number or briefly recapture a specific territory from them.
In 1981, the English paleontologist and popularizer Dougal Dixon published the book "After Man", in which people exterminated all any large animals, and then disappeared themselves. The surviving representatives of the fauna began to fill the vacant niches, rapidly evolving and giving rise to bizarre forms. In particular, the wolf-like creature, a direct descendant of the gray rat, has become the most versatile, widespread and successful predator of Dixon's world. Looking at her today, it is not hard to believe.