How to Use brown rat in a Sentence

brown rat

noun

• Pack rats, as well as their cousins the black and brown rats, don’t just collect sticks and seeds.
  — Sadie Witkowski, Smithsonian, 15 Nov. 2019
• Unlike the brown rat, the black rat is known to have carried plague through fleas on its body.
  — Madeleine Schwartz, The New York Review of Books, 27 July 2023
• Some people speculate that the brown rat saved us from the plague.
  — Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, 26 Apr. 2021
• The Vancouver Rat Project found that, in a typical day, the city’s brown rats stay within the length of a city block.
  — WIRED, 7 Oct. 2023
• The city’s rat is a Rattus norvegicus, also known as the brown rat, wharf rat, or sewer rat.
  — Madeleine Schwartz, The New York Review of Books, 27 July 2023
• Seoul spreads among and from the common brown rat—sometimes called a sewer rat, wharf rat, or Norway rat.
  — Beth Mole, Ars Technica, 4 Mar. 2022
• Now researchers are shedding light on why brown rats are the undisputed winners of the real rat race.
  — CBS News, 4 Apr. 2024
• The two most widespread and infamous rat species are the black rat (Rattus rattus) and brown rat (Rattus norvegicus).
  — WIRED, 7 Oct. 2023
• Its programs use African Giant Pouched Rats, which have a longer lifespan in captivity of around eight years compared to the four years of the common brown rat.
  — Rebecca Cairns, CNN, 24 Oct. 2022
• Hiding inside ships, the brown rat made its way to Europe in the 1500s and then to the Western hemisphere, Africa and Australia as colonizers arrived.
  — María Luisa Paúl, Washington Post, 2 Dec. 2022
• In our study, the commonest wild animal detected in New York City waters was the brown rat, a common urban denizen.
  — Mark Stoeckle, Smithsonian, 13 Apr. 2017
• The extinct animal is also closely related to a living rat species, sharing around 95 percent of its genome with the Norway brown rat, according to the study.
  — NBC News, 9 Mar. 2022
• For comparison purposes, the modern brown rat is less than one foot in length and weighs approximately 8 ounces.
  — Fox News, 15 Feb. 2020
• Between the species, brown rat bones had a higher delta-N-15 ratio than black rats across sites, suggesting the brown rats were eating more animal protein than their smaller competitors.
  — Lauren Leffer, Popular Science, 3 Apr. 2024
• Perhaps in part because of this, brown rats have been found to consistently prefer rewards that benefit others, as opposed to just themselves.
  — Oliver Whang, New York Times, 27 Feb. 2023
• From his bedroom window, Mr. Matallana-Puerto saw that the brown rat accounted for 88 percent of all animal visits to feijoa flowers.
  — New York Times, 22 June 2022
• Sewer rats are brown rats that live in sewers, and street rats are brown rats that live on the streets.
  — Rivka Galchen, New Yorker, 12 Feb. 2026
• There's a lot of work being done on invasive predators, such as the brown rat.
  — Alex Ledsom, Forbes.com, 29 Dec. 2025
• For the first time, a brown rat has been caught on camera actively hunting bats.
  — Sarah Durn, Popular Science, 30 Oct. 2025