Elizabeth Carlen and Michael Parsons are two biologists at Fordham University studying how human urbanization transforms the ecosystems in and around New York City.
Parsons works out of a waste management facility in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. There, he maintains a colony of free-roaming rats that he tracks using RFID chips. His goal is to understand the “silent language” of rats — the chemical signals called pheromones that rats use to communicate territory, stress, and reproductive state — and to understand what, if anything, city life changes about those signals.
Urban Ecology as a Research Platform
The Brooklyn site is unusual in that it provides a large, stable rat colony in a controlled-access location — unusual for free-ranging urban wildlife research. Most urban rat studies have had to rely on trapping and recapturing, which produces fragmentary behavioral data and is inherently stressful for the animals.
By implanting individual rats with RFID chips and positioning readers around the site, Parsons can track movement continuously without being present. That passive, non-interventional observation is what makes the behavioral and chemical ecology data meaningful. The rats behave as they normally would because no observer is disturbing them.
The Urbanization Question
Carlen’s work, running in parallel, looks at how urbanization itself — the density of human activity, the infrastructure patterns, the heat island effect — alters the ecological niche that city-dwelling animals occupy. Rats are a particularly good subject for this kind of study because they are one of the few large mammal species that has fully colonized dense urban environments worldwide.
Together, the Fordham research program represents a new category of urban wildlife study made possible by the combination of long-range RFID tracking and passive data logging — work that simply was not feasible at this level of resolution before inexpensive, reliable RFID identification became available.
Source
This article summarizes research by Elizabeth Carlen and Michael Parsons at Fordham University on urban rat behavior and pheromone communication, using RFID microchip tracking at a waste management facility in Brooklyn, NY.