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United States Technology

Cities Are Switching To 'Smart' Rat Control (axios.com) 45

Posted by msmash from the IoT-everything dept.
The next generation of urban rodent control relies on internet-connected traps that shock or impale a rat or mouse before isolating it in a chamber for disposal. From a report: The new Internet of Things (IoT) rat traps, which can be placed above ground or in sewers, continuously transmit data about rodent conditions and the number of animals caught. The information helps cities and businesses tamp down the rodent population without using noxious chemicals, which are bad for the environment and local wildlife.

Technicians are sent out to clear traps whenever a rat has been "dispatched" (the pest control industry's preferred euphemism for "killed"). Smart technology is "changing the pest control industry," says Dana Cote, director of SMART operations for Anticimex, which specializes in digital vermin control. The industry has been "somewhat static for many decades, using the same tools and materials," he said. But now "we have the opportunity to use IoT devices and data analytics and AI to really be more proactive than reactive."
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Cities Are Switching To 'Smart' Rat Control More

Cities Are Switching To 'Smart' Rat Control

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  • So, you're saying Russian hackers could potentially compromise rat traps and we'd be overrun with rodents? What was wrong with the old-fashioned wooden blocks with a big ass spring and a bit of cheese?

    Stop connecting things to the internet that have no business being connected to the internet.

    • With this new trap, a single person could service many more sewer traps since he (yes, HE) will know exactly which need servicing instead of having to check them all.

    • Re:Great, another cyberattack vector (Score:4, Funny)

      by Tim the Gecko ( 745081 ) on Friday March 18, 2022 @05:44PM (#62370193)

      So, you're saying Russian hackers could potentially compromise rat traps and we'd be overrun with rodents?

      "New rat control method brought unexpected problems", says Hamelin mayor.

      • So, you're saying Russian hackers could potentially compromise rat traps and we'd be overrun with rodents?

        Those vermin they stick together.

    • What was wrong with the old-fashioned wooden blocks with a big ass spring and a bit of cheese?

      That's a mouse trap. Rats are too smart for these, they see and understand the mechanism. That's why tradition rat traps are huge boxes with slow acting poison inside. Rats eat the poison, wander off, and die someplace else. That's the important step, as else the presence of cadavers might tip off the next rats that something might be amiss.

      But poison is uncool, because it might end up in the environment, or trap other animals than rats. Hence these newfangled electronic traps, with no recognizable mechani

      • The rats will kick a trap to spring it and then eat the cheese.

        Rats have genetically adapted to both avoid eating anticoagulant poisons and tolerate low doses.

        Warfarin resistance in rodents [wikipedia.org]

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )
        In general, rats and mice will avoid novel sources of food, like rat poison, until they run out of their normal sources for a while.
        The other thing, according to TFA, Portland tested 40 traps and caught almost 1,000 rats in a year. That's not going to make a dent in a big city's rat population until you scale it up to tens of thousands of traps. Every un-trapped female can give birth to 40 to 60 rats in a year, and every trapped rat just leaves more food available for the others.

        • Could you dose the normal sources? Spray it all over a restaurant waste container, lock the lid down so only rats can get in, and put up a bunch of highly visible multilingual signs to warn people not to take food?

          But then I imagine resturants would start putting up the signs without the poison as a way to deter homeless scavengers, which many people regard as no better than the rats.

    • Stop connecting things to the internet that have no business being connected to the internet.

      Partly agree. What most automated systems need isn't an Internet of Things, but a LOT, a LAN of things. Keep the automation local. Unfortunately local area networks don't sell cloud services, which is where the gold rush is, not in the one-time manufacture and installation of the actuators, sensors, cabling and antennas that do the physical work. Or maybe the cloud is part of the race to the bottom, the elimination of the most expensive component, the Homer eating donuts at the control panel.

      • Hardware is low margin. Make your product, and someone else will soon make a slightly cheaper equivalent - that's the power of the free market. Sometimes you can charge a premium based on brand reputation, but mostly you're goinng to be undercut. Great for customers. Not good for manufacturers.

        But services? That's where the money is!

        • Precisely. But what's good for the (service) provider isn't always good for the customer (lock-in, etc.)

    • We have better technology now.

      In my experience:

      * They're hard to set without injuring fingers and toes.

      * They're not particularly child-friendly, so I can't put them anyplace children might go.

      * Rodents are intelligent, and quickly learn what they are and how to avoid them.

      * That kind of trap often only injures, and doesn't kill. I don't want the poor critters to suffer. I don't even want them dead if that can be helped. I just want them gone, s

  • There has yet to be an invention that stops elected officials from doing dumb senseless things.

    Oops! Wrong window!

    As for rats...the best we can hope for is deterence and cats are the slow but ideal tool for that. Just keep the birds out of the area where the cats are working. Thank you Mother Nature.

    • So what you're saying is, they should be installing bird traps instead of rat traps. Genius!

    • Or just train your cat not to chase birds.

      All mine have ever needed is a stern talking to the first few times they caught one, as opposed to the praise they get when they catch rodents, grasshoppers, etc. Occasionally reinforced with a reminder to leave the birds alone when being let outside into a flock.

      A couple have even made friends with crows or magpies, who will come by regularly to hang out or play together. Or gang up on mean strays.

    • As for rats...the best we can hope for is deterence and cats are the slow but ideal tool for that.

      Not really: [theatlantic.com]

      But the results from the Brooklyn recycling plant are far less flattering to cats: They are absolutely lousy rat-killers. Over a period of five months, the motion-triggered cameras captured just two successful kills. And this was in a place crawling with rats; the population was estimated at around 150. The cameras captured 20 other stalking attempts and one other failed attempt to kill a rat.

      These results actually match what rat experts have been saying all along: Cats are not a good way of controlling city rats. The felines are excellent at catching mice, but adult rats grow 10 times as big as mice. And rats are fierce. “Once rats get above a certain size, rats ignore cats and cats ignore them,” says Gregory Glass, a professor at the University of Florida who has studied cat and rat interactions in Baltimore. “They’re not the super predator that folks have thought them to be.” But the misconception persists.

      • Cats are not a good way of controlling city rats. The felines are excellent at catching mice, but adult rats grow 10 times as big as mice. And rats are fierce. “Once rats get above a certain size, rats ignore cats and cats ignore them,” says Gregory Glass, a professor at the University of Florida who has studied cat and rat interactions in Baltimore. “They’re not the super predator that folks have thought them to be.”

        Upgrade to bobcats. No rats around here.

  • Hunt the rats where they live.

  • Not much beats a bucket with a dowel+ballbearings (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Fallen Kell ( 165468 ) on Friday March 18, 2022 @05:49PM (#62370213)
    Seriously, not much can beat a large/deep bucket (or trashcan) with soapy water at the bottom and a dowel that freely spins on ballbearing rollers with bait on the middle of the dowel. Mice and rats go for the bait, needing to take their feet off the edge of the bucket and fully climb onto the dowel, at which point in time it begins spinning, causing the rat/mouse to lose its footing/grip on the dowel and drop into the bottom of the bucket/trashcan into the soapy water. After which they drown or can be collected and removed by whoever is servicing the trap. Stick a small internet connected nightvision camera over top of the trap to monitor how full it is and you are good to go. Lots of farms use this kind of setup and catch upwards of 30-50 mice/rats every day in just a single trap.

    • Then it simply means farmers are fucking dumb. Why do they keep breeding mice and rats if they're so problematic that they need to kill them by the dozens every day?!

      • They don't breed them ya idiot. Farmers collect and store food, which attracts the rats. And hence cats domesticated themselves millenia ago, to eat the vermin. Its win-win.

    • Contraptions such as the bucket & dowel work for a while, but in the long run just lead to smarter rats.

      • Keep at it long enough and we might get some rats that can cobble together JavaScript about as well as the troupe of monkeys doing it now.

    • Exactly what I came to say.

      Never heard of using soapy water before - seems kind of superfluous. What, you want the soap to sting their eyes as they drown?

      But I suppose nobody gets rich selling overpriced gadgets to gullible politicians that way.

      • I would imagine the soap is acting as a lubricant, to keep the rats from any chance of climbing up the bucket walls.

        • This is exactly the reason for the soapy water. Many will also not put enough water at the bottom to all for live capture in case some other animal finds its way into the trap, such as a cat or some protected/endangered species (lots of things like the smell of peanut butter which is the preferred bait, and lots of other things are drawn to the commotion of the rats/mice in the trap and in the bigger/deeper traps such as ones using a garbage can, with the soap in them they can't get out either).
  • The article says:

    Somerville, Massachusetts, has just started a five-month pilot program with Modern Pest Services, which is owned by Anticimex. It's spending $40,000 to install 50 SMART Boxes in four neighborhoods, per [smartcitiesdive.com] Smart Cities Dive.

    I would hope these smart traps still kill rats without internet connectivity (and the outage would tell the operator to fix it regardless of whether a rat was trapped).

    Still, don't snap traps for rats [victorpest.com] (like the one in the article's graphic) work well enough? They certainly

    • A traditional snap trap can catch one rat/night, and may work just fine for a rat or two in your attic or whatever. That said, with how smart rats are it's quite likely that they won't come back for a while after seeing a comrade brutally killed and the body left for however long it takes the maintenance guy to come back and service the trap. Apparently some populations of rats have even figured out how to trigger the traps first to set them off and then eat the bait. If you want to kill rats at scale, you

      • I've had better luck with live traps than with snap traps. Once they're caught, you just drop the trap into a container filed with water.

        It's also a better option for outside, since you can let any unintentionally captured critters go.

    • Somerville will declare success and re-up their contract. In reality the rats will just have become so smart avoiding the trap they moved to Cambridge.
  • rats are very similar to humans.

    Just scale up.

  • Most of our rats have refused to upgrade to 5G.

  • It would be much cheaper to use Curiosity-based Anti-rodent Tactical Systems, also known as domestic housecats.
  • Ratface would get impaled.

  • Who is getting the anti-rat contracts? They have no incentive to kill lots of rats. They stay in business only as long as the rat population doesn't subside too much.

    • Have you ever lived in a coastal city that has had a port for a long time or that historically had a port? The rats have been around a long time and they are not going anywhere, they will come for the food/water/shelter that human habitation offers. You must think you are the St. Patrick of rats.

  • Too bad this technology can't be used to kill The Fucking Mouse...

  • Somehow people manage to avoid being pillaged by rodents on camp grounds by just taking simple precautions. No elaborate Edgar Allen Poe death traps or chemical weapons needed. But I guess nobody makes any money counseling common sense to a city, property manager, or business owner.

    Life would probably improve for humans if we were less facile and careless about living things in general.

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