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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

And the average female could produce up to 70 pups

In a single year, rats can fall pregnant immediately after giving birth.

And they have the capacity at least to produce huge amounts of litters.

But in reality, they adapt to their surroundings.

So even though in this Brazilian favela, 70 pups would be born, the survival rate was a fraction of that.

because they have big litters because lots of the pups die, essentially.

There was a US psychologist called John B. Calhoun who did some experiments about rat populations in the 1950s and 1960s.

And he created, he built huge pens in laboratories to see how many, if rats were given unlimited food,

what would happen to the rat populations?

Would it just keep expanding, expanding, expanding?

And he actually found that he did it firstly in a woodland setting and found that the rat population hits a ceiling at which it kind of balanced itself out.

So the rats would not allow the population to get over a certain extent that then resources would become limited.

And then he did it in a laboratory setting where again, rats were given all the food they wanted, but this time he limited the space.

um he called it a rat city um john b calhoun and what happened there is the limit of space combined with the prodigious breeding drove the rats kind of wild and they ended up sort of the rat society that fragile society that i mentioned earlier broke down entirely you had rats killing each other male rats were kind of formed together in gangs and kind of uh sort of march around kind of killing any rat they came across

I would argue it's not them with the diet problem, it's us with the diet problem.

And where rats get to enormous sizes is in cities where human food, and particularly calorific, poor quality, is dumped in dumpsters and rats are allowed to gorge on them and grow to a massive size as a result.

My pet rats eat rabbit food and they are total vegetarians and love dry bananas is their great weakness.

But rats are omnivores.

Rats will eat absolutely anything that's available to them.

There's been one incredible study that's found rats, and they're very powerful swimmers rats, diving down in rivers to retrieve freshwater mussels that exist on the bottom of rivers.

Showing 101–120 of 145 · page 6 of 8