Joe Shute

speaker

145 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 25 Jul

Joe Shute’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · Eat Almost Anything & Still Be Healthy & The Amazing World of Rats- SYSK Choice · 25 Jul 2026 podcast

For a species that lives so close to us and for such a sort of ubiquitous species, it's incredible how little is known about rats in the wild.

In a laboratory setting, we know more about rats than any other animal.

And they've actually... Rats have sacrificed more in the pursuit of human health than any other species in terms of the experiments that we've carried out on them to advance human health.

But in the wild...

Because they're an unfashionable species, because they're a species that a lot of people instinctively turn away from, there aren't actually that many, comparatively anyway, rat studies around.

But there is one fascinating study, which is a group of scientists in Paris who've been doing for the past few years.

And it also has a fantastic name, Project Armageddon.

And what they've been doing is doing a genetic mapping of the rat population of Paris.

And they found out an incredible thing that was a real sort of advance among rodentologists.

And previously it had been assumed that in the wild, rat populations were just one big population that was all sort of intermingled and intermixed.

And actually, when they started testing the genetics of the rats around Paris, they found that they were

existing in distinct clusters.

So the rats in one corner of Paris would be genetically distinct to rats living in another corner of Paris.

Now, what this means in sort of layman's terms is that it's much more like kind of families of rats and much more in a sort of criminal sort of syndicate way.

I see them as like individual kind of gangs and they control their patches.

And if rats will come into those patches, they will fight to the death

to protect them against sort of rats marauding in.

So actually what you have are far more complex social networks between rats that were originally understood.

There was one recent study in a favela in Salvador in Brazil, so a kind of slum setting, which was a real breeding ground for rats.

And scientists monitored rat breeding there over a number of years.

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