Does warm weather mean more rats in UK towns and cities?

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

Summer heatwaves and missed bin collections have created panic in the press that rat numbers in the UK are increasing. We ask Steve Belmain, Professor of Ecology at the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich for the science.

This summer Wales became the first country in the UK to ban plastic in wet wipes, with the other nations pledging they will do the same. Over the past few weeks there’s been work to remove a giant mound of them, known as ‘Wet Wipe Island’ on the Thames in west London. Marnie Chesterton has been to find out how they got there and what damage they could be doing to the river’s ecosystem.

Professor Sadiah Quereshi, Chair in Modern British History at the University of Manchester explains why we should see the extinction of species as a modern, and often political phenomenon. Her book Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction is the second book we’re featuring from the shortlist for the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

And Lizzie Gibney, senior physics reporter at Nature brings us a round up of the news causing a stir in science circles this week.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producers: Ella Hubber, Jonathan Blackwell and Clare Salisbury Editor: Ilan Goodman Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:05.6	Your time starts now.
0:07.2	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast.
0:09.4	Absolutely right.
0:11.5	So, you might like to know that the BBC makes loads of other podcasts.
0:15.6	Really?
0:16.4	Wow.
0:17.2	Many of them are very funny.
0:19.1	Which I think means...
0:20.3	A hatful of ha-hars. And energy. Even if we do very funny. Which I think means... A hatful of ha haas.
0:21.7	And energy! Even if you do say so ourselves. I agree 100% to that. Find them all on BBC Sounds. Just tell us a joke. Come on. Tell us a joke. Tell us a joke. Come on. Tell us a joke. Come on. Tell us a joke. Come on. BBC sounds. I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in. You have downloaded BBC Inside Science first broadcast on the 28th of August 2025.
0:43.0	I'm Marnie Chesterton.
0:44.5	Hello, coming up.
0:46.1	All the glam, all the time.
0:48.1	I take a trip to Wet Wipe Island.
0:51.4	We'll hear how extinction is a surprisingly modern and political concept, and nature
0:56.9	reporter Lizzie Gibney joins me in the studio to talk through the choicest cuts from the latest
1:01.8	breaking science. Lizzie, what can we look forward to? Well, there's going to be some extravagant
1:07.6	dinosaurs, some news about ageing, which may interest everybody, and also something
1:12.7	called the Great Fear, which is exciting enough a term, I think, to just leave that dangling.
1:17.1	Excellent. Well, talking of fear, you may have seen the headlines this week with predictions
1:22.9	of a plague of biblical proportions. Rats.
	...

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