Rats!

I'm a fan of science mags and I regularly buy Focus magazine. An interesting article about rats in the urban environment caught my attention. One part in particular worried me slightly. It seems as though these critters can evolve at an amazing rate. A small colony of rats finding home in an industrial freezer over some generations had adapted to their environment in creatures with longer hair and shorter tails. All in the space of a few decades as opposed to millions of years of evolution for us human beings. Incredible. Are we seeing a step up in the takeover the dominant species, humans? Perhaps by our own making are we promoting these vermin into a super species that in thousands of years may evolve into a human like physiology but with big teeth?

The current evidence is that these animals can tolerate high levels of toxic chemicals associated with rat poison. As mentioned before, they adapt extremely quickly and thanks to our love of McDonalds and other fast foods discarded by drunken revellers, fatten them up and make them stronger. Its is a heavy protein diet that makes them this way. Interestingly with the chemicals we currently ingest with this kind of crap, surely their fate is sealed in much the same way is ours. A population of overweight lardy arses?