Varmint district

Rats

Average life span: One year Distance traveled per day: 900 feet Diet: Anything, including soap

9PM The rat, let’s call him the Donald, is awoken by the scent of soggy pizza crust drifting through the sewer under West 34th Street. It’s here that he spends most nights jowl-to-whiskered-jowl with other rats (who don’t, incidentally, have any neighborly allegiances). “Two kinds of rats are considered pest species in New York City: the roof rat, or black rat, and the Norway rat, or brown rat,” says Darrin Lunde, mammalogist at the American Museum of Natural History. The latter—larger and more aggressive than the former—predominates New York’s rat population (which varies in estimated size from 250,000 to a whopping 96 million, depending on whom you ask).

11PM After gnawing through a trash bag—and unearthing his favorite: gooey macaroni and cheese—the Donald goes digging in his regular flower bed. If he burrows long enough (he can squeeze through holes in the concrete), he’ll reach a network of tunnels that lead to the basement of his most frequented Italian restaurant. “Rats have adapted to human habitats,” says Lunde. “Very few species are opportunistic enough to exploit this rich niche.”

1AM The restaurant storage space provides the Donald with several meals’ worth of grub —and lots of room to trickle his urine, which he does frequently and indiscriminately. “Rats eat about a third of their weight every 24 hours,” says Lunde, adding that they’ll consume literally anything, including any kind of meat and even soap. “They’ll gnaw their way into a tin can if they’re really hungry.”

3AM The Donald finishes his outing with a satisfying electrical-wire-shredding session. According to Robert Sullivan’s book Rats, a full quarter of all fires of unknown causes are started by rodents’ love of wire chewing (which comes, apparently, as a result of wires’ similarity to vines). And the oral fixation doesn’t stop there: They’ve been known to gnaw on concrete, too. “The brown rat’s teeth are stronger than aluminum, copper, lead and iron,” writes Sullivan. “They are comparable to steel.”

4AM Having squeezed through several tiny spaces to leave the restaurant (according to Sullivan, the rat can collapse its skeleton to get through an opening as small as a quarter), the Donald finds a trash-strewn corner in the Herald Square subway tracks and takes a nap. “Rats are actually very sedentary,” says Lunde. “They don’t move around unless they have to—that’s why you tend to see them during construction, or after heavy rain when the sewers are flooded. Otherwise, they’re very good at staying out of sight.”

6AM Just before dawn, the Donald gets some hot rodent-on-rodent action. “If they are not eating,” writes Sullivan, “then rats are usually having sex.” According to him, the creatures—which live for about a year—may mate up to 20 times a day, and in all-male rat colonies, males will have sex with other males. “The average for the brown rat is six to nine babies per litter, with six to eight litters per year,” says Lunde. “Do the math; it’s staggering.”