Rat Prevention Activity

      The first activity that we had for Bering sea days was rat prevention. It was talking about how many babys they can have.  Like, it would go in multiples of 2. So if you had a rat mama she would have 8 babys. Then 5 weeks later the babys could have it owns babys, it would be 16 now.
       Another topic we talked about was what do rats kill? Rats kill our sea birds, like kittiwakes.  Which isn't really good because we have the biggest population of sea birds in the Pribilof's. We want to keep it rat free here because we want to save our sea birds. Another thing we want to save is there next generation of sea birds.
      Next, we talked about how rats can come up here. Rats can come up here by boat, and by barge. I think the main way the can come up here is by barge. Why i think that is because they come up here often to drop off groceries for the stores and other stuff. But we have been rat free for awhile. So we are doing good on the barge.
      The next thing we talked about was where do they go? Rats live in places under the rocks. In little cracks of the rocks, that are very dark. Another thing is by docks or harbors. We have to make sure they don't get close to our sea birds. They can squeeze into small spaces as big as their head. Which isn't that big.
        This activity was very interesting. I didn't know how harmful they were until they told us. I really hope we dont get rats up here because it would be very hard to get them off of here. They can have babys really fast and mate really fast. Im just glad that we don't have rats, because they would hurt our population of our sea birds.