What do rats do in heat waves? Or to put it differently, what is it that they don’t do?

As temperatures have continued to stifle all will, and the humidity level has been Bangkok-in-a-thunderstorm-percent high, I raised the question with Kathleen Corradi, New York City’s first dedicated rat czar. The specific target of her enmity is the improbably named Norway rat, the dominant species in the city. Having no known association to Scandinavia, the name presumably galling to anyone living in Oslo, it arrived in New York in the late 1700s on ships coming from Silk Road trade routes and has defied efforts to evict it ever since.