Rat Facts

• The oils in cedar and pine are toxic to rats.
• Rats have poor vision. To compensate for this, a red or pink eyed rat will often weave its head side to side to add "motion" to see better. They also don't see in color.
• With lack of sight rats have a very keen sense of smell, taste, hearing, and touch.
• Adults are sexually mature in two to five months.
• Females produce three to six litters per year, each averaging seven to eight young.
• Adults live from six to twelve months.
• Rats transmit Murine typhus fever, rat bite fever, salmonellosis or bacterial food poisoning, Weils disease or leptospirosis and trichinosis, melioidosid, brucellosis, tuberculosis, pasteurellosis, rickettsial diseases, and viral diseases such as foot-and-mouth disease. Norway rats can also carry the rabies virus.
• The Norway rat and the roof rat are not native North American species. They traveled to the new world with the first explorers. The two species quickly invaded the continent because of their adaptability and fertility.
• Norway rats are found throughout the United States while roof rats primarily inhabit southeastern, Gulf Coast and southwestern states.
• Rats memorize their environment by body and muscle movement alone. They become so engrained by body movements that when objects are removed from their territory, rats will continue to move around them as if the objects where still there.
• Many times roof rats live in the upper stories of buildings, while Norway rats occupy the basement and first floor of the same building.
• Rats always travel the same runways and leave "smudge marks" - a buildup of dirt and oil from their fur - along walls, pipes, gnawed openings and beams and rafters.
• Rats constantly leave droppings. Fresh droppings are dark in color and soft in texture, but after three days they harden and lose the dark color.

Ant Facts

• The average life expectancy of an ant is 45-60 days.


• Like all insects, ants have six legs. Each leg has three joints.


• They have three sections to there body. Head, Thorax, Abdomen


• The ant has two eyes, each eye is made of many smaller eyes. They are called compound eyes.


• An ant can lift 20 times its own body weight.


• There are more than 12,000 species of ants all over the world.


• Ants don’t have lungs. Oxygen enters through tiny holes all over the body and carbon dioxide leaves through the same holes.


• Queen ants have wings, which they shed when they start a new nest.


• Some queen ants can live for many years and have millions of babies.


• The job of the queen is to lay eggs which the worker ants look after.


• Worker ants are sterile, they look for food, look after the young, and defend the nest from unwanted visitors.


• There are three kinds of ants in a colony: The queen, the female workers, and males.


• The queen and the males have wings, while the workers don’t have wings. The queen is the only ant that can lay eggs.


• The male ant’s job is to matewith future queen ants and they do not live very long afterwards.


• Once the queen grows to adulthood, she spends the rest of her life laying eggs! Depending on the species, a colony may have one queen or many queens.


• Many ants such as the common Red species have a sting which they use to defend their nest.


• The common Black Ants and Wood Ants have no sting, but they can squirt a spray of formic acid. Some birds put ants in their feathers because the ants squirt formic acid which gets rid of the parasites.