Rat statistics in NY busted by student
Print Edition
THERE may be 8 million stories in the Big Apple, but one of them — that New York City is home to 8 million rats, or one for every human resident — is probably a tall tale. In truth, the city’s rat population is probably closer to 2 million, said Jonathan Auerbach, a Columbia doctoral student who wrote an essay on the subject published in Significance magazine.
The urban lore that there are as many rats as citizens dates back at least a century, Auerbach says.
“Animals are terrible survey respondents,” he wrote in the article, which was the winning entry in a young statisticians writing competition organized by London’s Royal Statistical Society.
Auerbach’s initial plan was to use a method that involves capturing a random sample of rats, marking them, releasing them, and then capturing another. But the city’s health department was not enthralled with the idea.
Instead, he used complaints from the public about rat sightings, which the city tracks and publishes online. Combining the data with a number of assumptions, he was able to extrapolate the number of rat-occupied lots to about 40,500 across the city. If each inhabited lot is home to a typical colony of 50 rats, that would mean there are about 2 million rats in the city.
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