town has come under siege by hungry rats “causing havoc” and “eating everything they can get their hands on”.
One local said the plague started “a few weeks ago” but the rodent rush in Karumba, a fishing village on Queensland’s gulf coast, only shot to national and even international prominence this week.
Somewhat recently arrived resident Jon Jensen told Nine’s 4BC radio he believed they’d come from “down south” in plague proportions, likely due to the weather.
“They come in waves and, I dunno, they almost seem trained and organised but they’re there in numbers mate and they swim around in the rivers like little puppy dogs and they’re in numbers.
“They’re climbing up all the commercial fishing boats by their anchor chains and any other submersible pumps etc and they’re causing havoc with everything mate, you know.
“They’re hungry, they’ve swum a long way, they’ve come across land a long way and they’re eating anything and everything they can get their hands on.”
In a light-hearted chat with Drive host Peter Gleeson on Thursday, Jensen agreed the rodents “most definitely” outnumbered the human population of about 500.
He joked they were so big his neighbour didn’t realise the animal he’d been patting for the last three days wasn’t his chihuahua.
Predators are well fed by the influx but they can only eat so much.
“The birds of prey and the eagles, the wedge-tailed eagles and the whistling kites etc, mate, they can barely get off the ground because they’ve got their guts full, you know,” Jensen said.
A similar plague was destroying entire crops of sugarcane further south earlier this year.
“It’s the worst rat year that I’ve seen in my working career in the industry,” Herbert Cane Productivity Services manager Lawrence Di Bella told 9news.com.au in January.
Wet seasons usually stifle the population of canefield rats, killing them in their burrows or disrupting breeding cycles, so the gulf residents might be praying for rain.
For now, Jensen says they’ll deal with them in “true outback fashion”.
“We’re sort of just learning to live with them,” he said.
“And I’m personally organising a bit of a training regime to see if I can’t get a little rat army going.”
