Haven't signed into your Scholastic account before?
Teachers, not yet a subscriber?
Subscribers receive access to the website and print magazine.
You are being redirecting to Scholastic's authentication page...
Announcements & Tutorials
Renew Now, Pay Later
Sharing Google Activities
2 min.
Setting Up Student View
Exploring Your Issue
Using Text to Speech
Join Our Facebook Group!
1 min.
Subscriber Only Resources
Access this article and hundreds more like it with a subscription to Scholastic Math magazine.
STANDARDS
CCSS: 6.SP.B.5
TEKS: 6.12C
Article Options
Presentation View
Rats in the Hood
They’re lurking in backyards, subways, and sewage pipes. You don’t see them often, but rats are living with us in big cities. By studying these urban rodents, scientists are learning how cities influence animals.
Matthew Combs is a graduate student at Fordham University in New York City studying ecology, which is the science of interactions between animals and their environment. He recently found that rats living in the uptown neighborhoods of Manhattan have different genes from those living below 14th Street, or downtown.
Why? The midtown area of Manhattan lacks abundant food and shelter, preventing uptown rats and downtown rats from mating and exchanging genes. That means that Combs can test the DNA of any rat and predict where it lives. “Just like a desert or a jungle is a type of ecosystem, the city provides a very specific type of environment for animals,” says Combs.
Combs analyzed 262 brown rats in Manhattan. Of those, 123 are uptown rats and 89 are downtown rats. How many are midtown rats? Record your work and answer on our Numbers in the News answer sheet.
< PREVIOUS
Building for Birds
NEXT >
Happy Pi Day