The COVID-19 outbreak has rodents working overtime scrounging for scraps, as the virus has dramatically reduced the city’s regular food supply (i.e. garbage) for many rat colonies.

The disruption is something of a tale of two rat cities. In some parts of New York it’s business as usual, with four-legged vermin regularly dining out as if the virus never struck. But for colonies in areas where eateries have closed and people have all but disappeared, such as Times Square's Restaurant Row (West 46th Street between 8th and 9th Ave), it’s slim pickings. A report by THE CITY shows that areas such as Manhattan Community Board 3—home to parts of Chinatown and the Lower East Side—saw a 5% decrease in trash tonnage, as did the Upper East Side, where many residents have fled to second homes.

Bobby Corrigan, the city’s quintessential expert on rats, told Gothamist that with these types of closures there’s simply not enough food to go around for the current rat population.

“Food-dependent rats of commercial facilities, those rats are gonna be the ones seen during the day now, straggling about, wandering about, trying to get into spaces,” said Corrigan, adding that rats often turn on each other, going so far as eating their own young, when sustenance dries up.

“They start killing and eating each other right inside that nest,” he noted. “When things just aren’t available, and they get hungry. It’s the nearest rat that’s smaller and weaker that will be the protein.”

And if a rat colony were to take the risky step in infringing on another rodent colony’s turf—the result of an exodus from a food-depleted part of the city—expect a battle to break out.

“They will not give up that territory without a big battle,” said Corrigan, who’s personally witnessed such beefs occurring between rodents well before the coronavirus crisis. “It’s like something out of Ben-Hur.”

And this appears to be happening all over — Corrigan’s friends across the city have briefed him on never-before-seen rat sightings, a symptom of an itinerant rodent. It’s led to another urban rodentologist, Robert Sullivan, to dig deeper on that migration, pointing to low-income New Yorkers as bearing the brunt of an increased rat population in their neighborhood.

“There are going to be a lot of rats right now because we are in a moment when we are getting a good look at how badly we have designed our cities in terms of the greatest possible public health for the greatest number of people,” said Sullivan.

Estimates from the city show there were 968 rat sightings reported in March compared to 1,020 in February, a 5% drop. But Corrigan said that’s not the best metric to use as New Yorkers have shifted priorities, caring less about reporting sightings and more on how to put food on the their own tables.

The migration of rats has extended to other major cities in the country. New Orleans, for instance, is seeing greater number of rodents out in the open, notably the famous Bourbon Street that’s currently a ghost town after city officials there ordered a lockdown.

Even if rats were to die off in large numbers because of COVID-19, they'll be back.

“After we come out of this COVID thing, hopefully, and we’re back to business as usual, if those same areas don’t do their trash right, or we are once again putting back food into bags and just putting them out at night for collection anytime later, one rat will start growing pretty quick with a family and in six months they can replace whatever was wiped out from starvation,” said Corrigan. "And you’ll be right back to square one. That’s what makes them so successful. And that’s why all five boroughs have rats. It builds its numbers up very quickly so long as there’s food.”

With additional reporting by Jake Offenhartz.