Cranston, R.I., is seeing a population boom — but its not human families that are moving in. In this episode, ecoRI News reporters Colleen Cronin and Rob Smith break down some of our recent reporting on why more rats are moving to the ‘burbs.

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This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Colleen Cronin 

Welcome to The Blab Lab, a twice-monthly podcast from the reporters of ecoRI News, where we unpack the critical environmental issues facing southern New England. I’m reporter Colleen Cronin, and today I’m here with my colleague, Rob Smith, and we’re going to chat about something a little ratty … well, actually we’re just going to talk about rats. And how they infiltrated one Rhode Island town. Hi Rob. How are you doing?

Rob Smith 

Doing pretty good. Ready to talk about some vermin.

Colleen Cronin 

Rob, before we get started talking about your story, have you seen a rat today?

Rob Smith 

Today? No, but I’m sure they’re somewhere near us right now.

Colleen Cronin 

Technically, there’s rats everywhere. Nothing against Roger Williams University, where we’re recording this podcast.

Rob Smith 

Rats are one of those animals that are everywhere. We’ve just sort of just accepted them. While my reporting is about rats in Cranston, I don’t mean to pick on Cranston. I’ll get into how I got the idea for this story and how I reported it in a minute. But you know that common urban myth that you are never more than eight feet away from a spider or whatever it is, or facts like that, that illustrate that there’s a lot more of this specific animal or organism than you think? The same applies to rats. They’re there. You just don’t see them.

Colleen Cronin 

So you’re not picking on Cranston, but in Cranston, there is a rat problem. Can you talk about it?

Rob Smith 

Cranston is well known to have a rat problem. The apocryphal story from residents is that when they tore down the old Narragansett brewery, that dispersed the rat population through the city. That’s apocryphal. No one knows where they come from. Rats are also everywhere else in Rhode Island; Johnston in June just launched their own rodent-control program, because the complaints are beginning to pile up. And it’s something that everyone deals with at some point. You’ll probably see a rat at some point, no matter where you live. They are a silent shadow.

Colleen Cronin 

But they tend to be a little bit more noticeable maybe in urban areas.

Rob Smith 

Well, with population density comes rat population density. And it’s primarily because of trash.

Colleen Cronin 

So, I live in Providence, and I was walking around Brown University one day, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a bunny; it’s so cute.” And then I got closer and it was a rat. And I lived in New York City for a summer and the rats were everywhere. But I never saw one so big as I saw in Providence.

Rob Smith 

Rats are famously a problem in New York City, and the only people that are really in the United States studying urban rats are in New York City. There’s a guy at CUNY who’s studying how rats in different neighborhoods and boroughs of the city are evolving and adapting differently to their survival needs in each borough. So, for example, one will be better at swimming; one will be able to eat something else or navigate better in a subway. Rats are making these micro adaptations, but they’re evolving differently based on their needs in a block of the city. And I think that’s so cool.

Colleen Cronin 

I have a grossed out look on my face, because I’m imagining a rat swimming and I don’t like it.

Rob Smith 

They can swim. They like old sewer pipes, especially if they’re not full. So swimming is basic for them.

Colleen Cronin 

So, Cranston. Let’s talk about Cranston. How do we know that there is a problem there?

Rob Smith 

I’m a slut about giving away my email address.

I receive a lot of emails from different newsletters. And I get newsletters from different elected officials. One of them is a city councilman in Cranston, John Donegan. And last fall he sent out his post-election email. And the copy said something like, “I know rats are a really common problem whenever I talk to my constituents. Here’s the city’s free rodent program.”

And that’s when a light bulb went on in my head, because I’m like, how bad is the rat problem? I hear people talking about it because I know people in Cranston, and that’s one of the complaints they have, but how common is the problem?

And I got to talking to Donegan, and he said when he was knocking on doors for his re-election this year, it was one of the second or third top complaints people had.

COVID was kind of a perfect storm in Cranston in 2020. Everything shut down — businesses, restaurants. So more people are home during the day, and it’s not so much they were home more to notice perhaps, you know, the little rat friends, but all their trash was getting generated at home. And since restaurants are closed, rats are going go where the trash goes. So the rats dispersed more into residential neighborhoods.

It’s the sad truth rats are everywhere, but they’re also impossible to track. There is just no amount of money or technology that’s going to track rats.

Colleen Cronin 

So what numbers do you have from Cranston that illustrate the problem?

Rob Smith 

I talked to John Donegan and did a simple data request to the Department of Public Works. Cranston has a rodent baiting and proofing program, where you call, and a guy comes out and gives you a rodent trap and inspects your property to make sure you are rodent proofing it. We can tell where the rats are by tracking requests for the traps.

Rob Smith 

So I asked for that list of rodent baiting traps from the city, I did it in two or three open records requests. And what I got was a master list of every address in the city that had requested a rat trap since 2017. I only went back five years. Because mostly it was a pandemic era complaint. So I got a master list of every address that requested a rat trap, when they requested it, and when it was fulfilled. So I had the raw data.

Then I mapped the problem, because I really wanted to map where houses requesting rat traps were and then be able to track where people are seeing the rats, and not only seeing them, but seeing them enough, and perhaps in great enough quantities to complain that they’re in the house or they’re in their neighborhood.

What you’ll see then, is where the rat problem is new in places, and where it’s getting worse; you can see it with a concentration of neighborhoods requesting traps.

Colleen Cronin 

So year to year, the total numbers are declining a little bit since 2020.

Rob Smith 

Correct. But actually that doesn’t mean that it’s still not getting worse. My data goes back from June of this year to 2020. It’s about 300 new addresses requesting traps in 2020. And then it doubled to 618 traps in 2021. It was 513 traps in 2022. And then this year, as of June 1, it’s 83.

Colleen Cronin 

But the numbers are showing that there was a spike during COVID, and then you’re also able to get down to a more granular level with the map you made, showing that it’s moving to some areas. Can you talk specifically about where those areas seem to be?

Rob Smith 

They’re most heavily concentrated in central Cranston.

Colleen Cronin 

What is in central Cranston for folks who don’t go there?

Rob Smith 

It’s neighborhoods like Laurel Hill. It’s close to Park Avenue, toward City Hall and everything south. And near the Providence city line.

And then you can also see two separate trends. One of the trend lines you can see new traps spreading farther south along Rouet 2. And then you have another a much smaller line going into western Cranston, which is where some of the wealthier suburbs are.

The uncomfortable grim truth is … you will never be fully rid of rats. We are always going to be living with rats in some way.

Colleen Cronin 

So part of the reason we know there’s a problem in Cranston is because they have this rodent-control program. Is that program in other places?

Rob Smith 

Johnston just launched a similar program. Providence has one. Most cities probably have one. I’m not sure why it’s such a problem in Cranston, specifically.

Colleen Cronin 

And it’s a free program?

Rob Smith 

It’s free. It’s free to get the traps. You call a number, and a guy comes to your house. He inspects your house, makes sure it’s rodent proof. So again, sealing up your house is the best way to improve your house … and sealing up your trash as well. He comes, he baits the trap, and then he’ll come back as needed. There’s a lot of repeat visits; that shows in the data.

Colleen Cronin 

So can you guess why rats have gotten worse?

Rob Smith 

No one really knows if there’s more rats than there were before the pandemic or if we’re just noticing them more. But there’s two contributing factors identified in my article as to why the problem appears to be worsening.

There’s climate change. We don’t have cold winters anymore. Rats are not built to survive extreme cold temperatures. Part of the reason they live underground, besides avoiding predators, is that nest is better able to be kept warm. During the cold months, their reproductive cycle slows down during the cold months because they would have to leave the nest to get food for their pups, so they have more limited time to forage for food at night when it’s the coldest. They are nocturnal creatures. They have limited time to find food before they die of freezing temperatures or exposures or get buried in snow or whatever that cause may be. But we’re having milder winters in New England.

It doesn’t really snow. We used to get guaranteed maybe four to five inches of snow every winter. Now snow and temperatures below 30 degrees are becoming a little more rare. So the milder winter makes it easier for rats to survive by not dying from exposure to cold temperatures.

The factor is rats are attracted to trash and human development. And we are developing more over the last couple of years. areas such as Garden City in Cranston have expanded out. And if we figure people generate five pounds of trash a day, and on average a little under a pound of that is food waste … when you throw away food and you don’t properly contain it in your trash bin, it attracts rats.

Colleen Cronin 

So what issues do rats cause? Why do we want to get rid of them?

Rob Smith 

If you look at the CDC website, they can carry up to 55 different kinds of pathogens. They are generally a sign of a public health crisis.

Colleen Cronin 

As reporters we are not really supposed to talk about our opinions. But what are your personal feelings about rats?

Rob Smith 

I think they are cool as hell.

So I’m really interested in them. Obviously, if there was one in my house, I wouldn’t like it. I’d have the same reaction as everyone else.

… I have a sick fascination with rats, and they are just a really, really fascinating part of the urban ecosystem. Which is another thing I’m interested in … if you really want to see how wildlife and plants are going to adapt to climate change just look at cities. Look at urban areas where wildlife, like rats, are evolving to survive …

And it is possible there may be some some kind of micro difference between rats in different cities and towns. I don’t really know. I don’t think we’ll ever know.

Colleen Cronin 

Maybe rats in Providence like coffee milk and the rats in New York …

Rob Smith 

Don’t. Even. [Inaudible]

Colleen Cronin 

[Laughter]

 Rob is taking off his headphones and walking out of the studio.

Thanks for coming on the show today, Rob.

Thank you to our listeners for following along. We want to thank Vanessa Carlton for letting us use her song “Willow” which you hear at the beginning and end of each episode. We also want to thank Roger Williams University and professor Bernardo Motta for letting us use the recording studio. Thanks also to Jo Detz for editing and mixing the episode. If you have any questions, tips or podcast ideas, email me at [email protected].