In the summer of 2017, behavioral ecologist Michael Parsons found what he was looking for: a Waste Management transfer station in Brooklyn, New York — a literal trash heap and a natural rat colony in its preferred habitat.
Parsons, a visiting scholar at Fordham University, had been searching for nearly two years for a location where he could observe city-dwelling rodents in their natural environment. The Brooklyn site gave him free-roaming rats he could chip and track, and a resident population of feral cats that had been living there for years.
What he found challenged a widely held assumption.
Cats Are Not Effective Rat Predators
Popular belief holds that cats are useful for controlling urban rat populations. Parsons’ data suggests otherwise. In 79 days of observation, the team recorded only two rat kills. The rats were not naive to the cats — they were actively tracking and avoiding them, shifting their behavior and movement patterns in the presence of a cat.
The RFID chips let researchers document exactly where individual rats were moving and when, producing a continuous record of rat behavior across both the light and dark phases of the day. Without individual identification and automated tracking, this level of behavioral resolution would have been impossible in a free-ranging colony at a working industrial site.
The Role of RFID in Field Behavioral Research
This study illustrates something important about RFID technology in ecological and behavioral research: it works beyond the cage. The same identification and tracking approach used in vivarium home-cage monitoring can be adapted for field deployment, enabling researchers to study animals in contexts where direct observation is impractical or would alter the behavior being studied.
The Brooklyn study used low-frequency RFID — the same frequency range UID products operate in — to track individual animals across a large, uncontrolled outdoor environment.
Source
This article summarizes findings reported in published behavioral ecology research by Michael Parsons and colleagues at Fordham University. The study used RFID microchips to track wild rat movement and document cat-rat interactions at a waste transfer station in Brooklyn, NY.