Mizoram: Attack of the rats

[Shiloh]

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9198000/9198744.stm

Attack of the rats
By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News
Friday, 19 November 2010


The local farmers call it a flood; an inundation that happens every 50 years.

Others believe it to be an act of God, an inevitability.

It isn't water flooding the precious farmland in north-eastern India, but rats.

A once in a generation, gigantic plague of rats, that ruins crops and leaves people starving.

A rat army so big, so mythical, that until now some scientists did not believe it was real...

 

[Ronan Kelly]

Re: Mizoram: Attack of the rats

Mautam (Mizo, ?bamboo death?; also spelt mautaam) is a cyclic ecological phenomenon that occurs every 48 years in the northeastern Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur which are thirty percent covered by wild bamboo forests. At this time, Melocanna baccifera, a species of bamboo, flowers at one time across a wide range.

This event is followed invariably by a plague of Black Rats in what is called a rat flood.[1][2] This is produced as the rats multiply in response to the temporary windfall of seeds and leave the forests to forage on stored grain when the bamboo seeds are exhausted, which in turn causes devastating famine.[3] In the past, famines caused by this phenomenon have played a significant part in shaping the region's political history. The most recent spate of flowering, on the bamboo species' genetically-linked timetable, began in May 2006, and the state government and the Indian Army are attempting to prevent a famine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mautam

see also http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=145016