It seems that New York has tried a number of ways to reduce their rat population, recently with fall traps. Unless they can kill all of the rats at once, it seems that this will just free up resources for the surviving rats to use. A feral cat population (which would increase in response to its food resource, i.e., the rats) seems to be the best way to control this. From an ecological perspective, are there alternatives to controlling a population of rodents, apart from using predators?
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$\begingroup$ While your question is interesting, it is asking for opinions. Moreover, answer to this question would not be straightforward and require a lot of details and explanations and thus making it unsuitable for the stackexchange Q&A format. Perhaps you can search for some reviews on this topic. $\endgroup$– WYSIWYGCommented Sep 9, 2019 at 10:00
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$\begingroup$ There has been talk of controlling mosquito populations with CRISPR and gene drives. You can read about it from Nature (nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02087-5). In the future this may be possible for rodents. $\endgroup$– IsaacCommented Jul 1, 2020 at 18:34
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