IF you live in the Los Angeles area and are of the genus \o7Rattus\f7 and the species \o7rattus\f7 or \o7norvegicus\f7, the last person you want nosing around in your habitat is Ray Alegre.
A little after 3 a.m. on a recent Wednesday, Alegre knelt in the yellow industrial light of a warehouse parking lot in Commerce, getting ready to come after you. He was unwrapping a boxful of 60 ultra-sticky glue boards; should you carelessly tread on one, you might as well lie down, curl your pointy tail around yourself and get ready to meet whatever your sneaky little brain imagines to be your Maker.
"Here, we find rats," Alegre said, nodding toward the 400,000-square-foot warehouse. "They leave the doors open, and merchandise and supplies come in, and they don't know what's coming in with it. When we took over this account, within the first three months we caught between 80 and a hundred."
The 44-year-old Alegre, a technician with Covina-based Isotech Pest Management, has a reputation within his company as a man who can outthink, outplan and outmaneuver the cleverest \o7Rattus. \f7He is a decorated soldier in mankind's unending war against its most fertile, unloved and constant mammalian companion -- a creature that, at this time of year, is reproducing furiously, preparing to dispatch hordes of juveniles into the Southern California landscape.
Biologists call rats commensal, which means they "share the table" with man -- an elevated way of saying they live primarily by eating our food. They are also famously neophobic -- that is, wary of new things (such as traps) that they encounter in a familiar environment.
The black, or roof, rat, \o7Rattus rattus\f7, arrived by ship in America about 1600. The brown, or Norway, rat, \o7Rattus norvegicus\f7, came around the time of the American Revolution.
In most of the United States, the Norway won out. Los Angeles, however, is among those coastal regions blessed with both varieties. The lush, ground-level landscaping favored by homeowners here offers abundant nesting for Norways, and the palm and fruit trees afford perfect harborage for roof rats.
What's more, we have avocados, which rats love to distraction. "You've got an avocado tree, you've got rats," Alegre's sidekick, pest technician Miguel Garcia, likes to say.
Garcia had pulled up in the darkness just as Alegre was finishing his prep work at the warehouse. When Garcia opened the back of his Isotech truck, out wafted the atrocious odor of decomposing rats.
