Hide the Cheese

CUTE LADYBUG NOT A CHINESE BEETLE




THESE ARE DEAD RATS
THIS IS A BAMBOO FOREST
WHAT'S THE CONNECTION?



Remember a couple of years ago when those ChinesE beetles, cleverly disguised to look like cute ladybugs until they bit you, were everywhere? I mean everywhere. I'm not sure if they flew all the way from China (and boy were their wings tired!) or some Chinese leaders got upset because we sent back all the lead-painted toys from the shelves at Wal-Mart, but those pesky varmints were everywhere. Worse than the annual mosquito infestation, and perhaps worse than the latest outbreak of bedbugs that seem to be everywhere, their presence was maddening. But they weren't rats, at least. (If you are squeamish about rats, go do something else...do NOT read the following.
Some interesting facts about rats:
1. Their teeth continue to grow all through their lives.
2. A female rat that just gave birth can mate immediately and get pregnant within hours of delivering a rat horde.
3. Rats can have litters every 3 weeks, and those babies will be mature (and having their own little rats) in two months.
4. Rats must eat 10%-15% of their body weight every day.
5. A GIANT rat was discovered last year in Papua, New Guinea.
So, why is all of that important to you? For the time being, it isn't, unless you live in the regions of northeast India like Bangladesh and Burma. Those folks have rats thicker than, well, hordes of rats...we're talking millions upon millions of rats, and it's the strange and the ordinary occurrences of nature that brings these varmints out in such quantities.
First of all: the natural. Rats are naturally voracious little bastards that need a huge food supply. That's where bamboo comes in. It seems that there are 26,000 square kilometers of nothing but bamboo trees in those regions of the world. It supplies building material (heck, I even have bamboo towels!...very soft), clothing and, of course edibles in the form of bamboo shoots. BUT, every 50 years, the whole shebang dies. Really. In the process, the trees drop all their seeds onto the ground to start the new growth. That means (serious math coming) that there are 80 tons of seeds from bamboo trees on every hectare of land. By my calculations, a hectare is equal to 2.47195381 acres. That means TWO hectares cover the size of a football field squared. By any calculation, that's a heck of a lot of food for would-be varmints. so, every 50 years, the rat hordes sweep down from the steppes of Russia-oops, that's the Mongols) to eat themselves silly...something like a Thanksgiving feast. The problem is that rice also grows relatively close to the ground, and even rats like a well-balanced diet, so they destroy the rice crop as well.
You can see how this gets to be a problem.
Now, throw in the unusual cyclones that have hit that area in the past few years, wiping out populations that might otherwise be around to kill off the first few million rats that come hunting. Changing weather patterns have also disrupted birthing and dying cycles int he area, so we have...
a regular rat overrun. Even when the government put a bounty on the rodents' heads, there were far too many to kill. In one area alone over a three-month period, more than 2.6 million rats were killed...and it was but a small percentage of the rat population which reproduced at light speed.
So far, it's been once every fifty years, but who knows?
What I DO know is that I'm not buying any more bamboo at Pier 1!