🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

Had an absolute blast working with Claudia Hirtenfelder to create a series of episodes. Still can't believe that I went from being a fan of The Animal Turn to contributor. I will be shamelessly spamming your feeds every week so do give it a listen! Won't be a waste of your time 🗑️

All in all, our rats had lower prevalence than in previous Leptospira (44% -> 1%) or Trichinella (19% -> 0 %) surveys in Helsinki and generally lower prevalence than in recent surveys across Europe. (1/4)

We don't know why rat pathogen and parasite prevalence in Helsinki is low, but my educated guess would be low population densities and population bottlenecks during winter. (2/4)

As a peculiarity, Helsinki Urban Rat Proj @helsinkirats.bsky.social made a decision in principle of not killing rats, so we used rat carcasses that we got from stakeholders, such as pest management companies, allotment garden associations and a trash incineration plant. (3/4)

Next for our research: we will publish about rat population trends in Helsinki, we will start ecological modelling, we will zoom into some of these pathogens, we will look at the human occupational exposure, and we will study how pest management affects these prevalences. (4/4)

Our new issue is out 👉🏽 bit.ly/EUS2940 Featuring a rapid communication from 🇪🇸 providing further evidence on effectiveness of #influenza #vaccination in young children to prevent both influenza infection & #hospitalisation #VaccinesWork #PublicHealth Tuomas Aivelo @aivelo.bsky.social

Rotissa on Helsingissä vähemmän taudinaiheuttajia kuin muualla Euroopassa, kertoo Helsingin yliopiston tutkimus 🐀 Tuomas Aivelo @aivelo.bsky.social Helsinki Urban Rat Proj @helsinkirats.bsky.social hs.fi/tiede/art-2000…

🚨 New paper klaxon! My paper on the link between observer quality and attitudes and other background variables Helsinki Urban Rat Proj @helsinkirats.bsky.social out today at Ecology and Evolution: doi.org/10.1002/ece3.7… A short thread:

Representing on conference circuit: Karolina Lukasik gave a talk at Pathways Europe in Córdoba, Spain, on urban allotment gardens and "living with the awkward other".

I am still accepting applications for a postdoc at Drexel. Come work with us on urban evolution!

1/2 📢 Our last #paper about #rats and #AngiostrongylusCantonensis published‼️ 🐀 Our study suggest at least 2 different routes of introduction of infected #Rattus by ships: one originated from Asia via #Taiwan and the other from America via #Brazi 🇹🇼🇧🇷🚢 …

He heard ppl thought rats caused the bubonic plague

Now out in npj Biodiversity: Multispecies relations shape bird-feeding practices Link: doi.org/10.1038/s44185… From the bird-feeding section of Helsinki Urban Rat Proj @helsinkirats.bsky.social A short thread: 1/8

Bird-feeding could be the most common human-wild animal interaction in the Global North. My colleagues collected an impressive dataset on changes in bird-feeding and rats were one of the major reasons to reduce feeding so I was asked to collaborate. 2/8

The first part of data was presented in Purabi's paper few months ago in People and Nature: doi.org/10.1002/pan3.1… My group focused on the 15,000+ open-ended answers which proved to be a treasure trove. 3/8

There are many papers on the motivations to feed birds and how bird-feeding affects bird and non-avian communities. There are less studies on how communities at the bird-feeder affect the feeding practices. 4/8

People described a number of reasons to increase feeding such as caring for endangered species, wanting to provide nature connection to children or cats looking behind the window... 5/8

Similarly, a number of reasons to reduce feeding in addition to rats such as corvids eating too much, hawks and cats predating, pathogens being spread and neighbors shouting over the fence. 6/8

The most interesting finding was that almost any species or reason could either lead to increase or decrease of feeding, depending on the context. 7/8

This was an effort of multiple people devising data collection, two students coding and a number of us helping in analysis and writing up the results! Really fun interdisciplinary effort. Illustrations by Susu Rytteri! 8/8