Are rats using Miramar storm water pipes as a super highway?
Around the world, rats are known to use storm water pipe networks to move around cities.
This is a concern for our goal of a Predator Free Wellington and is a risk we are considering as we begin our planning to make Miramar Peninsula predator free next year.
Predator Free Wellington is fortunate to have great partners, and in this case the Greater Wellington Regional Council monitoring team was on hand to help us investigate.
The investigation involved putting out peanut butter laden wax tags in 25 storm water pipes around the peninsula. After a week, the tags were collected and checked for signs of rat chews. The result was that none of the wax tags had been visited by rats.
This is great news! There were no signs of rat chews, which means it’s reasonable to conclude that while we know rats live in the coastal environments, they do not appear to be accessing the storm water network. This incredibly detailed work is part of a wider body of work to identify risks to the project goals and therefore how we plan to mitigate these. We are learning a whole heap!!
Making Miramar Peninsula predator free is our first step in the city wide project rolling out over the next ten years.
Posted: 1 October 2018