Dead rats best form of rodent control
July 26 - August 1, 2010
THE “most effective way” to control the variety of rat presently ravaging fields in Bago Division is to leave dead rats as a deterrent, a local expert said last week.
“The rats see a dead body of one of their species and it makes them scared and so they don’t return,” said U Thin Aung, director of the Myanmar Agriculture Service’s Central Agriculture Research and Training Centre (CARTC).
Other measures to control rats include trapping, poisoning, fumigating and hunting with dogs, he said. Farmers can also protect their fields by surrounding them with plastic fencing.
In 2010, rats have damaged paddy fields in Bago and Ayeyarwady divisions and the MAS’s township level officers are now working to control the rat invasion, an official from the service’s plant protection department said.
The service estimates the rats have destroyed between 5 and 35 percent of paddy fields in seven townships in Bago Division and two in Ayeyarwady Division.
He said he had seen population explosions of the black rat (Rattus rattus) before in both Myanmar and other Southeast Asian countries and claimed it was “essentially a normal situation”.
“But now it is a little difficult to control [the rats]. After Cyclone Nargis, the ecosystem was altered and the rodent problem has gotten bigger” because many of the rats’ predators, such as snakes and owls, were killed in the storm, U Thin Aung said.
He said bamboo flowering had also contributed to the population explosion.
