What are a rat’s mating habits?

Rats are known to be able to bring youngsters with great speed. In fact, you could easily have from few to few hundreds rats in your home, only during one year. Rats are capable of spreading with an amazing speed.



If you do some calculations, one single female rat is capable of producing over a thousand baby rats in one single year. This simply proves the significance of natural selection and species’ places in ecosystem. If rats found themselves in an ecosystem where they didn’t have any natural enemies, it would take them less than a year to overpopulate the area.

A female rat is capable to mate as for many as 500 times during one year, with several different male rats, during the period of six hours, or so-called “period of receptivity”. The “period of receptivity is a state in which a female of a rat experiences somewhere around 15 times per year. This means that a pair of brown rats is capable to produce as many as even 2,000 baby rats during one year a year, in case that they have the opportunity to breed to their full extent. An average rat will hit sexual maturity at age of roughly three to four months.

The gestation period for most rats will last from 19 to 22 days, which is similar to, for example, mice, whose gestation period is between 17 and 21 days. Both Rats and mice can bring in average 8 to 12 babies in one litter. These numbers can’t be always precise enough, since rats can have as few as 1, or even more- as many as 20 babies. Rats are to be weaned at 6 weeks of pregnancy, while mice will wean during 5 weeks.

Babies of the rat can be weaned at 4-5 weeks, however, owner you can, with no fear, leave the girls with their mom as long as they want. However, they should remove boys before 5 weeks to remove the possibility that they may breed with their mother or their sisters. These are the main characteristics of both black and brown rat breading cycle. In general, rats are capable of multiplying with tremendous speed that would leave you stunned.

In case of home invasion, this type of hyper-breading is exactly the reason why you need to react fast and remove the animal. If you’re not careful, your house could easily become infected with hundreds of rats. These rats could endanger you or any small children that are living in your home. They are also very unsanitary, as their feces can transmit some of the worst illnesses known to man.

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