Thousands of rats cause havoc in Queensland amid plague fears: ‘They’re eating everything’

A rat infestation has upended a tiny fishing village in Queensland, Australia, as the rodents are “eating everything they can get their hands on”.

For months, certain regions of the state have been grappling with an ongoing infestation of rats and mice. A spike in population has compelled the rats to migrate towards the coast in search of food, experts say.

“They come in waves and, I dunno, they almost seem trained and organised but they’re there in numbers mate and they swim around in the rivers like little puppy dogs and they’re in numbers,” a resident of Karumba, a small fishing village in Queensland was quoted as saying by Australia’s Nine News.

“They’re climbing up all the commercial fishing boats by their anchor chains and any other submersible pumps and they’re causing havoc with everything mate, you know.

“They’re hungry, they’ve swum a long way, they’ve come across land a long way and they’re eating anything and everything they can get their hands on,” resident Jon Jensen said.

It was also reported that hundreds of dead rodents in recent days had been washing ashore, while others hastily traversed boat ramps and infiltrated garden sheds and homes.

Another resident, identified as Yvonne Tunney, told the Guardian that the rats “get on the move in mass numbers … A week ago the river was just alive with rats floating around.

“Everybody’s working furiously with baits and traps to get them under control.

“They call it the plague rat because they periodically undergo very big increases in abundance.

“They’ve got very high reproductive rates … so when big rain falls in arid environments, which is their natural habitat, they increase,” she said.

Professor Peter Banks, a rodent expert from the University of Sydney, told the Guardian that there was an 80 per cent chance of a plague after rainfall of 750ml. In arid areas, these sort of scenes only happen once a decade, he said.

The increase in the rat population is because of a combination of favourable wet weather conditions for breeding and a plentiful harvest, reports said. With Queensland anticipating more wet weather, some residents fear that the worst is yet to come.

Some residents in Karumba have also created homemade rat traps for the rodents. A resident of Normanton in Queensland, Derek Lord, told the media that his car was destroyed by the rats. He has been tossing food scraps in a bin in hopes of capturing the rats.

“I’ve found about 50 of them in the bin the past couple of days. They’re everywhere … I heard them behind the freezer the other night.”

The 49-year-old told AFP: “Mate, there’s rats everywhere. We have hired vehicles and they literally destroyed a car overnight, taking all of the wiring out of the engine bay.”