Amanda Becker was about to head out on a run when she saw the rat in her toilet.

“I flip up the toilet lid and a rat literally pops its head out and starts jumping, trying to get out of the toilet,” Becker says of the experience, which happened earlier this month.

Becker, a journalist who lives in a residential apartment building north of Columbia Heights, screamed and slammed the lid shut. It was not a welcome guest, to say the least: “Rats are one of the few things I’m truly afraid of,” she says, especially now that stay-at-home orders require she remain in her apartment. 

She contacted the nighttime security guard in her building, who ultimately fished the rat out of the toilet with a trash picker (multiple flushes proved an insufficient strategy).

Becker had been reading about how rats in places like New York City and New Orleans have become “super brazen” since coronavirus-related restaurant shutdowns have left the rodents without easy sources of food from commercial dumpsters. Washingtonian warned the region in late March that “coronavirus closures will force rats into people’s homes.”

But while D.C.’s rodent experts are seeing an increase in rat complaints in some residential areas since the closure of D.C. restaurants, Becker’s toilet guest was not prompted by the pandemic.

Gerard Brown, the program manager of the D.C. Department of Health’s Rodent and Vector Control Division, says that he gets about two calls each year about rats in toilets, who are “just as surprised as we are” to find themselves there. Normally, they live in the sewers, which Brown describes as “like a little city down there … the food is flushed right to them so they don’t have to search for food.”

The rodents’ compatriots above ground, however, are in a very different situation than the sewer dwellers.

“Where there’s less trash, the rats have to be more aggressive and take more risks,” says Brown, noting that the rodents are “very smart and they can adapt to different situations really quick.” 

Right now, the rat colonies that long depended on the overflowing dumpsters and grease containers outside of D.C.’s restaurants and bars are looking for food elsewhere.

“We’re recently starting to get calls from people that share alleys with commercial establishments,” says Brown. “One resident said they had been living in their house for 40 years and never saw any rats until the restaurants closed.”

Brown says his team of 18 pest controllers “have noticed that residential areas where we have been working in the past have seen an increase [in rat activity] and we believe that’s due to more people staying home, generating more trash.” 

However, Brown says that last week’s 311 calls about rats were down overall in comparison to the same time period in 2019, which he found concerning. (The Rodent Control Division provides extermination on public property as well as the exterior of private land, with an owner’s permission.)

“People might not think that we are open,” he says. “We want people to know that we are open. We encourage people to call. We still want people, if they see something, to say something in regards to rats. We want to be able to respond as quickly as possible—we don’t want the rats to start breeding.”

Indeed, this spring was shaping up to be a doozy for rat reproduction, thanks to the mild winter and early spring, per Bruce Colvin, an ecologist and international rat expert. But “when food sources decline, their reproductive rates decline,” says Colvin. “The rats’ reproductive rate is in direct relation to the quantity of food available.”

Colvin notes that it’s not just restaurant dumpsters with less or no food: “There are fewer people in parks, fewer people walking up and down sidewalks dropping part of a sandwich. There’s less food litter in general in the urban space.”

Both Brown and Colvin are expecting the number of pups per litter to decrease and the amount of social strife to increase in rat colonies used to feeding off commercial dumpsters and the like. “When they don’t have food, it’s kind of gross, but they eat each other,” says Brown. “That could be helpful for” keeping the rat population down. 

So are more rats accustomed to dumpster dining heading towards the residential areas, where there’s more pickings than usual? Not as much as you might expect, because the rodents who already call it home will try to stop them. “Rats are territorial. Rats in one area are going to defend their territory against invaders,” says Colvin. “Some relocation can happen, but that is not going to be the dominant behavior.”

Colvin thinks that any decrease in the rat population will be short-lived, if people don’t take this time to make changes to their lived environments.

“The rats will be able to rebound readily if people don’t take a hard look at how they store their refuse and maintain their yards and property,” he says. “A sudden surge of food in parks and restaurant districts—the rat population will be cued up for some pretty significant reproduction.”