A rat king is a collection of rats whose tails are intertwined and attached. It usually occurs when the young ratswhich sleep together in closed spaces, get entangled in the tail, forming a knot.
the tails tied they are prone to becoming encrusted with dirt or adhering to substances such as sap, tallow, blood, food, feces, or urine.
When the rats wake up and try to wriggle away from each other, the knot tightens and traps them.
Various examples have been documented throughout history, mainly from Europe, with the oldest report coming from the 16th century.
The largest recorded rat king was found in May 1828, in a chimney in the German town of Buchheim, Altenburg. It consisted of 32 individual rats.
The discovery was made when a miller named Steinbrück had the walls of his chimney torn down, whereupon he found a mummified rat king under the rubble.
The rats were hairless and blackened with soot, though their claws remained sharp.
Steinbrück handed over the record-breaking rat king to the Altenburg Natural Research Society, which put it in a display case and presented it to the public.
In 1908, it was moved to the newly built Mauritianum Museum of Natural History, where it remains on display today.
The Altenburg rat king was composed of black rats (Rattus rattus), also known as house rats or roof rats. In fact, most surviving specimens of rat kings are formed from black rats.
The reason for this, according to some theories, is that black rats, known to be particularly skilled climbers, have prehensile tails, like monkeys, that instinctively do a grasping reflex when they touch something.
When confined to a small space, such as between the top floorboards of a house, rats’ tails grab each other and intertwine.
As the rats continue to crawl over each other before falling asleep, the resulting knot is irreversibly hardened by the aforementioned cocktail of goo and other materials such as clay, hay, and dirt.
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