From reporters Dana Hedgpeth, Tara McCarty and Joe Fox:

They burrow in gardens and shelter in nests of shredded cardboard under stoops. In alleyways, they quench their thirst at leaky faucets and snack on liquids oozing from bags.

Rats are a fixture of urban life, but early in the pandemic, their populations in urban cores shrank as restaurants, parks and offices shut down — and their access to trash did too. But many adapted, desperate to survive. They ate off the bottom of restaurant doors in search of food, alpha male rats ate weaker ones, and a large number, to residents’ frustration, migrated.

“They’ve gotten into places where there were no rats, and now people are calling and saying, ‘I’ve lived here for 20 years and never seen a rat until now,’ ” said Gerard Brown, who oversees rodent control at D.C. Health.

Now with offices and restaurants opening up again, the rats are back as well.

“There’s a rat resurgence,” said Bobby Corrigan, among the world’s best-known rodentologists. “They may be bouncing back with larger families in both the urban core and in the more residential neighborhoods of D.C.”

Known formally as Rattus norvegicus, the brown rat is the species found in D.C.’s streets and many major cities. Most people agree that rats are gross and that they can cause health problems and property damage. They chew through wires in the walls of homes and cars. They can bite pets and humans, and if a person eats food contaminated by rat saliva, urine or feces, they can fall sick with diseases.

It’s tough to accurately count rat populations because the four-legged fiends are nocturnal and live among the shadows of alleys and sewers.

Orkin, one of the biggest pest control management companies in the country, ranked D.C. fourth in its annual ranking of the top 50 “rattiest cities,” placing it behind Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

In D.C., reports of rat sightings are up: The city service hotline has fielded more than 13,300 complaints in the 2022 fiscal year — compared with roughly 6,200 in the 2018 fiscal year, according to the city’s health department. Despite this increase, health officials said they haven’t seen a surge in rat-related illnesses.

More complaints mean more work for rat catchers: Before the pandemic, Scott Mullaney and his wife, Angie Mullaney — who run a business that uses Patterdale terriers to catch and kill rats — used to average about 25 rats at a job site. Now as people return to life and business as usual, their dogs catch closer to 60 per site some nights.

“They’re coming back with a vengeance,” Corrigan said.

Read more here. We put a whole video game in this too, wild right: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/dc-rats-thrive-pandemic/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com