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

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You have downloaded BBC Inside Science first broadcast on the 28th of August 2025.

I'm Marnie Chesterton.

Hello, coming up.

All the glam, all the time, I take a trip to Wet Wipe Island.

We'll hear how extinction is a surprisingly modern and political concept, and nature reporter Lizzie Gibney joins me in the studio to talk through the choicest cuts from the latest breaking science.

Lizzie, what can we look forward to?

Well, there's going to be some extravagant dinosaurs, some news about ageing, which may interest everybody, and also something called the Great Fear, which is exciting enough a term, I think, to just leave that dangling.

Excellent.

Well, talking of fear, you may have seen the headlines this week with predictions of a plague of biblical proportions.

Rats.

Brits told to prepare for winter of rats as expert catches 20-inch pests.

Race for a plague of rats after a sweltering summer.

Lots and lots of rats, an animal not even David Attenborough could love, are apparently heading for our homes, according to rat catchers.

Is this some clever self-promotion from pest controllers?

Or are rats the size of a daxond really wandering the streets of Britain?

And if so, is this climate change related?

For answers, I'm joined by Steve Belmain, Professor of Ecology at the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Greenwich, and one of the world's foremost rodent researchers.

Welcome, Steve.

Hello, it's a pleasure to be with you.

So, first off, is it even true, are we heading for a rat-infested winter and what would that even mean?

Well, I'm afraid to burst all the bubbles, but I doubt that's the case.

I mean, usually what happens on a seasonal basis is that the rat population grows a bit in the summer.

And that, we must remember, is really driven by food waste.

So this is people going out, having picnics, spending time in the park, being around outside a lot more than they would be in the winter.

And that means, unfortunately, they're not picking up after themselves or leaving a lot of litter and waste around, which the rats are eating.

So it is true that usually in the summer, the rat population grows.

But also in the winter, that means it often declines because people are at home, there isn't so much food waste around, and it is a bit colder, which makes it a bit tougher for rats to survive.

Can I just check one of the other facts?

They were talking about catching 20-inch rats, and I got the ruler out, and then I sort of double-checked that against dogs, and it does say about the size of a daxon, and that's massive.

Please tell me this is mainly tail that we're talking about.

It's actually 20 centimetres, not 20 inches.

Ah.

One of the problems is that a lot of people actually do measure the tail.

And of course, the tail is doubling the length of the body that way.

The best way is to weigh them.

So if you weigh a Norway rat, they're really mostly around 400 or 500 grams.

The maximum size that I've ever caught is about 600 grams.

So it's a substantial body weight.

But again, if you compare that to a cat, it's probably about half the size of most cats.

That's still half a kilo of rat.

Is that surprising to you?

Or do we just not know our rats people don't have a lot of experience in seeing rats around when they see them they're running away they may have all their fur fluffed up which makes them look a bit bigger than they usually are but they do get that big and that's normal so it's nothing that's happening through super fast evolution or something like that, which some people would have been saying, oh, they're just getting bigger all the time.

Norway rats really aren't going to get much bigger than that.

That would also go against some of their other habits, which is, of course, to try to get through small spaces.

Is this an urban problem or are people finding more rats because you know people are composting more in

spaces where they have gardens right?

Urban problems are certainly I think related to this problem of not picking up after ourselves but most rats in the UK are related to farms.

There's a lot of food on these farms and it's usually very easy for the rats to gain access to that animal food.

So, I mean that may be happening in people's backyards.

If you have pets, you have dogs or cats, or you're feeding the birds.

Again, there'll be food waste associated with that that rats will help themselves with.

But the really big rats I find tend to be on pig farms because there's just so much food.

And, you know, they're really just helping themselves.

They've got a nice little habitat, sleeping with the pigs at night or, you know, whatever farm it is, they really can get very large there.

So, and that's where most rats are actually.

No one's ever really been able to count the number of rats.

We always hear these stories, oh, you're never so far away from a rat.

Yeah, is it six foot from a rat?

Can I fact check that one with you?

Yeah, it's impossible to check that and it will vary so much depending on where you are.

If you're in a dense urban area, maybe that's so.

But of course, it varies from city to city.

If you go to a place like Hong Kong or Singapore, they have very few rats there because they have a very zero tolerance approach to them.

They have much better hygiene.

People don't drop their litter on the ground in places like Hong Kong and Singapore.

So they have a much reduced rat problem, even though they're really big cities with a lot of people and a lot of food around.

So it really does come down to personal responsibility.

There was a study of rat populations in 16 global cities published back in January in Scientific Advances that found that rat numbers significantly increased in 11 of those places over the past decade.

Do we know if rat numbers are increasing in the UK?

No, unfortunately not.

No one is monitoring this issue at all.

I mean, the only real data we have have comes from pest control companies, and that's largely based on call-outs.

The problem in unpicking that is that that is related to our own perceptions, our own tolerance.

Again, you know, if you were in New York City and you saw a rat running around, you'd go, so what, and just carry on.

And the opposite, in Singapore, you'd be on the phone to your local politician immediately.

London or the UK is probably somewhere between those two extremes where people are calling out for help when they have a rat in their house or their garden.

And that may be on the increase because we're becoming less tolerant of it.

It's also been argued it may be on the increase because more people are working at home and more observing rats around in the environment.

It may be related that there really are more rats around, and that could be driven by people being more prone to litter than they were in the past.

But trying to unpick all that, no one unfortunately has really gone into those studies.

So we're really just guessing.

You know, we've just come through a pandemic that was caused from bats and rodents were somewhat involved in that too and some of the mutations that went on with Omicron.

So we should be worried about disease that can be transmitted by rodents.

We're really just waiting for a big outbreak to happen before we really do something, I think.

So shouldn't we be monitoring rat numbers rather than guessing if they are vectors of disease, if they harbor fleas or something that are vectors of disease?

Shouldn't we be monitoring them before the actual plague breaks out?

Indeed, I think we should be.

And, you know, this is part of my job as a researcher is trying to raise awareness about these issues and trying to encourage surveillance.

Some states and some cities are doing this around the world, but it costs money.

And people have to see this as a priority versus other worries and concerns they might have in society.

So any advice, Steve, about how we can live better alongside rats if they're not going anywhere?

Yeah, I think, you know, again, it really does come down to personal responsibility.

Again, people may not not realize when they drop some litter or they don't put it in the bin itself or the bins are overflowing.

And so there is problems.

I know in some local authorities where the bins are not being collected.

Just be aware if you are going to the park and you're feeding the birds, what's happening to all that leftover food that the birds start eating.

And if the next person comes and feeds the birds and the next person comes and feeds the birds, there's going to be too much food there and the rats will be cleaning up what's left over.

I think that's everything, but I do want to know how you feel about rats.

I see them as a fascinating creature.

I mean, I study them.

They have, you know, it's really important to understand their behaviors.

I think we have a problem in that we often anthropomorphize them.

We give them human characteristics and abilities they don't really have, that we think they're too clever to control.

You know, I hear that all over the world.

They are smart, they can learn, but we have to believe we're smarter than the rats.

There are sustainable ways of controlling them.

And there are good things about rats, too.

I know some people have them as pets, but I mean, there are these programs using rats because of their sense of smell.

Yes, those guys really are massive.

Those are really big rats.

Those are African giant pouched rats.

And so, yes, they're well over a kilo in size.

And they're trying to train them to do many other things now,

such as looking for illegally traded products and drugs and cargo and things like that.

And, of course, most of our research and medicine has all been driven by using rodents in laboratories.

So, you know, a lot of that sacrifice by rodents has been done for the benefit of mankind.

So, you know, we have to respect them for their abilities.

At the same time, I would never have one as a pet myself.

I learned earlier this year that they laugh when you tickle them.

I mean, there's a guy who trains them to drive little cars around.

So they get in this little car, they can set the destination, and they actually don't just go straight for the food.

They go on a jaunt.

They just drive around for fun.

Love it.

So, you know, this is, again, it's just highlighting that they are clever animals and they do have feelings and, you know, social structures and things like that.

So that's why, of course, people like them as pets, because they are affectionate creatures.

Thanks to Steve Belmain.

And if you want more rat content, including their joyriding skills, go to BBC Sounds for the podcast extras.

And we're sticking with repellent subjects because this summer Wales became the first UK nation to implement a ban on plastic in wet wipes.

It will come into effect in December next year.

We contacted DEFRA and they say we should expect a similar ban to be announced in England in the coming weeks and Scotland and Northern Ireland intend to follow suit.

If you needed evidence that the ban might be a good idea, look no further than an infamous local landmark in West London, Wet Wipe Island.

I went to watch efforts to remove it.

I've come down to the side of the River Thames in a very smart neighbourhood of London called Barnes.

There's a digger in front of me.

It's low tide and he's racing against the tide to dig up and filter the foreshore

because

the area in front of me and as far as the eye can see to my right and left is actually a mound of wet wipes.

I'm Felicity Rhodes.

I work for Thames 21.

We're an environmental charity working to improve the health of London's rivers.

So, what you're looking at here, it looks just like a normal muddy riverbank.

But if you look to the right there, you can see that the foreshore is raised up and that's all sediment wrapped up in these plastic wet wipes.

Wow, so hang on, so this bit just over here, which is what, about the size of a tennis court?

Yes.

That's all wet wipes, what I'm looking at between me and the water.

Yes, all of this kind of scratchy top surface of sediment, and all beneath is wet wipes wrapped up in leaf litter and sediment.

And you're the people who've been doing the

unlovely work so far of cleaning up the wet wipes.

Absolutely, so volunteers have been working with Thames 21 since 2017 and they've counted more than 140,000 wet wipes from this 250-metre stretch of foreshore.

So, what we've seen is this accumulation over a number of years of this material.

And does that change the ecosystem?

Absolutely.

So, the plastics in the wet wipes leach out as microplastics which are entering the river system and ultimately end up in the sea.

And we find microplastics in river and marine life in lots of examples.

The wet wipes are changing the nature of this vital ecosystem for the fish and the birds living in and around the river.

I always feel a bit sad when you find the herons and the geese sitting in and amongst the wet wipes because you just think it cannot be very good for them.

To really quantify carefully the amount of wet wipes, you can see the kind of scale of it.

The only way to really remove all of what we're seeing is with heavy machinery and plant equipment, and that's what we're seeing today.

My name is Grace Ronsley, and I'm the Director of Sustainability for the Port of London Authority.

We're on the side of the foreshore, and we're watching one of the excavators work, and they're using what's called a rake-and-shake method.

So, we're very carefully raking the top of the foreshore and then shaking the content out so that we're left with the wet wipe-containing material.

Most of that sediment, silt, and any invertebrates that might be living there have an opportunity to fall away.

The idea is to leave as much of the foreshore on the foreshore as we can and just take away that contaminated material.

It's hypnotic.

We're watching this giant sieve on the end of a digger going into the black, black mud, scraping a load of it and then just going shaky, shake, shake.

And there's just strings of what are clearly wet wipes hanging down stuck in the moors of the digger.

So how long is all of this going to take?

This looks like laborious work.

You know at the moment it's a moving feast but we are expecting the work to take up to a month so we'll have contractors on site for that period of time doing this sort of very careful and deliberate removal.

I mean how do you stop this happening in the future?

Well this is the first of its kind as a project so we are learning.

We don't know if wet wipes will come back to the site.

There are wet wipes in the system, i.e.

the river system still, that will move.

So we'll be working with our volunteers at Thames 21 to continue to monitor the site to ensure that if we do see wet wipes coming back, that we can act quickly and we can help understand where they're coming from.

I'm John Sullivan.

I'm the head of the Tideway Integration Group and I work for Thameswater.

Why is there a wet wipe island here?

It seems to be a slow spot on the river where material, like material that's been in the watercourse itself, seems to settle out on this particular bank.

And you're from Thames Water.

I know Thames got fined £122 million this year for, I guess, the same question but why is Thames letting wet wipes into the water?

Thames Water has dealt with its infrastructure on the River Thames.

So we've built the Thames Tideway Tunnel which is the third and final phase of our improvement program for the tidal Thames.

The tunnel itself will intercept 20 CSOs up and down the river.

A CSO is a combined sewer overflow and from those combined sewer overflows we anticipate that we will intercept 250 tonnes of plastics every year that would have been flowing out into the river when there was a rainfall and a combined sewer overflow then poured out into the river.

Okay, so people are flushing wet wipes down the loo.

There's too much for the system to handle and they've been coming out of sewage overflow pipes and ending up here.

Yes they've been coming out of sewer overflow pipes.

We've hardened our infrastructure to be able to cope.

What we now need to do is work with our customers and encourage our customers to only put pee, poo and paper down the toilet.

I don't blame our customers at all in the slightest because on the side of the packaging it says they're flushable.

Just because they actually go down the toilet doesn't mean that they're actually flushable because once they go down the toilet they endure and they either get taken out on a fine screen at a sewage treatment works or they coalesce together in the sewer network and they create blockages and then what you see is 24,000 blockages just in this seven months of the year so far are creating blockages just just from wet wipes.

Recently in Oxford we've had one taken out, weighed about 80 tonnes, about the size of a blue whale.

I mean you say you don't blame your customers but a lot of people do blame Thames Water.

I

have to go back to the £122 million fine.

So I mean shouldn't you have been doing more?

We've done the level best with the funding that we've had

and on occasions if we've failed then the regulators are in the right place to put a fine upon us proportionate with what they see the scale of the failure.

We recognise that, we need to move on, we need to make improvements.

John Sullivan from Thames Water there.

Science reporter Lizzie Gibney is with me in the studio.

Lizzie, I imagine as a parent of young children, you are on the front line of wet wipe usage.

I am.

I could not feel guiltier.

So to me,

something that is still recognisable as a wet wipe years after its use is it feels like over design.

Do you know why the plastic's even there?

I think it's something structural that really keeps it together.

I mean, in our house, we've got both versions.

We've got the kind of, in theory, flushable, very soft tissue wipes, and they really do just fall apart.

Whereas the wet wipe, you can give a very vigorous, vigorous wipe with it, and it will stay perfectly intact.

So I think it's quite likely something to do with that.

But yeah, it does seem to be way more durable than we actually need.

Listeners, any wet wipe build-ups in your rivers, do let us know.

The email is insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

That's the email that many of you used last week to get in touch about trophy hunting.

On last week's programme Professor Adam Hart gave us his argument for the role of trophy hunting in conservation.

He made the case that where trophy hunting happens it gives local communities a better economic return than agriculture which gives them an incentive to preserve the wildlife's natural habitat.

We asked for your thoughts and boy did you give them.

Some wholehearted support, some furious disagreement and others somewhere in between.

Our producers have voiced a selection.

So some of you were persuaded by Adam's point that right now animals and habitats need a monetary value in order to be protected.

If we lived in a world that was even slightly fair or just, we wouldn't be in the situation we are in now, where people with lots of money get to determine what lives and what dies.

But this is the world we are in, and being offended by the activities of hunters doesn't entitle us to put wildlife and their environments at greater risk.

Some of you told us that even if trophy hunting raises more money for conservation, you thought killing animals for sport is never okay.

This listener said they hope ecotourism was the way to go because...

Trophy hunting is not the only alternative to poorly paid agriculture returns, and it is immoral of you to present it as such.

There are plenty of people demanding non-violent tourism options.

More people will pay to visit for non-hunting tourism than will pay for hunting.

Even if the volume of visitors were lower, even if the revenue generated was lower, it doesn't justify the unethical abuse of a species in this way.

We also had loads more emails wanting to know more about the money and the gene pool changes behind trophy hunting.

Thank you so much, and we can come back to this in future episodes.

Just a reminder, this is your science show, so anything you'd like us to look into, well, the email is insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

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In his column Adam Hart also said it's untrue to claim that trophy hunting is driving species to extinction.

But here on Inside Science we're always keen on second opinions and it just so happens that coming up next we have author Sardia Qureshi, a professor of extinction, to talk about her book Vanished.

So first off does she think there is evidence that that trophy hunting has ever contributed to the extinction of a species?

I think it would depend what you mean by trophy hunting.

I personally see things like collecting specimens for museums as a form of trophy hunting because it confers a kind of scientific prestige if you have specimens of endangered or extinct species.

And I think the best example of a species going extinct due to that kind of collection is the great orc.

The last known pair are seen by a couple of collectors who are hunting for eggs.

I do think it's also really important to bear in mind that irrespective of whether hunting contributes directly to extinction, we also need to think about what kind of relationships underpin that kind of exploitation of a natural resource and what that means in terms of how we relate to life on earth and respect other beings.

And for me personally, that's a much stronger argument about how we should deal with the issue of hunting rather than specifically whether hunting contributes or even is the major driver of extinction.

Professor Sardia Qureshi is Chair in Modern British History at the University of Manchester and author of Vanished, an unnatural history of extinction.

It's the second book we're featuring from the shortlist for 2025's Royal Society Book Prize.

In this book, Sardia argues that extinction is not just a science but a political choice.

Here is Sardia with the story of the extinct Liverpool pigeon.

Imagine a way of life taking millennia to come into being and once embodied in thousands, millions or billions of living beings.

Then, imagine it reduced to a tentacle, dismembered wing or stuffed skin.

The indignity of a solitary relic is all that remains of many ways of being.

Liverpool is well known to people the world over as the home of the beetles, but to me it is the final home of the extinct Liverpool pigeon.

This stuffed skin is the only known specimen of the species.

The bird is adorned with glossy dark green iridescent feathers along the back, spotted with pale wedges shaped like guitar picks, giving rise to its informal name of the spotted green pigeon.

The black peak tipped with dull yellow looks uncannily like a miniature dodo bill.

The spotted green pigeon was first described by the naturalist John Latham in his ten-volume A General History of Birds, published in the 1820s.

After Latham's death, the 13th Earl of Derby, Lord Stanley, bought the bird at auction.

He later donated his collection to the City of Liverpool, forming the core of a new museum and forerunner of the current World Museum.

No one knows for sure where the pigeon once sang its song or was captured and turned into a stuffed memorial of extinction.

Through DNA analysis, scientists know the pigeon's closest relative is the Nicobar pigeon and at one remove the extinct Rodriguez solitaire and dodo, suggesting an Indian Ocean home for the entire family.

But archival sleuthing also suggests a Pacific origin.

The linguist and ethnologist Tuira Henry drew on her grandfather's life to write a book called Ancient Tahiti in 1928.

She noted that locals knew of a speckled green and white extinct bird called the Titi.

Henry might well have been describing the Liverpool pigeon, but we will likely never know for sure unless someone finds undisturbed bones that can be matched to the stuffed skin.

The mystery of the Liverpool's pigeon's origins is compelling, but to know so little about any way of being consigns it to a remarkably miserable fate.

While many species lie waiting to be known in museum drawers, others have been lost without a trace, often due to humanity's actions.

We are living through a period of quickening species loss, and many fear that we are living through Earth's sixth mass extinction.

Instead of treating life as an exploitable resource, we need to choose to treat life with much greater respect and care to prevent future extinctions.

I started writing about extinction because I wanted to go beyond stories of scientific discoveries or individual species to thinking about how best to protect ways of being alive on Earth.

Being a historian of extinction feels like living with restless ghosts, but it is also a way of building hope.

Histories of extinction can help us make better choices by helping us to better understand the nature of extinction.

Some ways of being died out long before we existed, but the way we have imagined prehistoric and more recent losses is an unnatural history of our own making.

Whether playing with toy dinosaurs or visiting natural history museums, we often first encounter extinction as a biological process or catastrophic loss caused by natural disasters.

While extinction can be natural, it is also a human idea that we use to make meaning from species loss.

That makes extinction a political choice, while histories of extinction offer opportunities to choose wisely.

Amid vanishing possibilities, choosing differently now will help us to imagine and create worthwhile futures in which all life can live rather than die and lie in museum drawers.

Professor Sadia Qureshi.

Next week, could a dose of music replace your pills?

I talked to Dan Levertin, shortlisted author of Music as Medicine.

Now Lizzie Gibney, senior physics reporter at Nature, is patiently waiting to tantalise us with new science.

Lizzie, where do we begin?

I think we begin with aging and heat waves.

So this was a paper that was out in Nature Climate Change last week and it's showing that repeated heat waves age us as much as smoking or drinking.

So we know that heat waves have an effect on the body.

Often we think about short term, you know, people die every year, unfortunately, in a heat wave.

But this study was able to look at the longer term, kind of more subtle physiological changes to our organs.

So this study was done in Taiwan on 25,000 people, so that's a fairly large study.

And they looked at medical assessments of all of the kind of organ function over about 15 years and compared it to how much exposure they'd had to heat waves in the previous two years they found that for each extra 1.3 degrees heat on average that aged people's biological clock by about nine days now that doesn't sound like loads but that was just two years worth right so if you if you scale that up if you're an 80 year old and you've had a lifetime's worth of exposure to heat waves that's that's a year exactly it's a lot, a lot more significant and it was much, much higher also for people who work outside, like labourers.

I think it was about 33 days in that case.

You know, personally, I think we should all have very good reasons to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to try and halt climate change, but for some people, maybe this could be an extra one, is that

it's making us all age faster.

Thank you, Lizzy.

Next, the Great Fear.

What is the Great Fear?

So if you're au fae with your 18th century history, which I'm sure you are, mine.

Of course, of course.

You'll know all about it.

The great fear was a period of time at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 when rumours spread throughout France that there was some kind of aristocratic plot, that they'd hired foreign fighters in groups of bandits who were going around doing things like getting rid of all of the crops and were going to starve out the people.

So the thing is, this was just...

rumours.

And what happened was groups of local militia formed to fight these bandits.

And of course, when the bandits weren't there, they then went on something of a rampage, destroying property and documents and invading castles.

And there was a great period of unrest, which was based on these unfounded rumours.

Now, the reason we're talking about this on a science show and not a history one.

is they have a very innovative way that researchers have found to study this phenomenon.

So this was published in Nature This Week and the researchers looked at the spread of the rumours like a virus.

They could pinpoint where and when the rumours spread and then they were able to show using an epidemiological model, model, a mathematical model, exactly how it spread.

And it was very much like a virus.

It rose into a peak and it spread at a rate of about 45 kilometers a day down these road networks.

Wow.

I love that we can put a miles per hour on rumours spreading.

We've got a clip here from the authors.

There is a crucial difference to viruses themselves.

Let's hear this.

During COVID, you often heard about when is the peak coming and also in the Great Fear there was a peak and then a second peak after re-infection.

The difference is that you know usually when you are infected you are

immunized so you don't you're not reinfected.

In this case we have seen many re-infection.

This was the difference of the model.

So exposure to fear doesn't immunize you in the same way that a vaccine does.

That's right.

But there were other parallels with the virus that were very useful in this model.

So they also looked at kind of how susceptible these different towns were to the rumours and that's helped them to answer a long-standing debate in history about just what this great fear was.

Was it something political related to the French Revolution, or was it something of a sideshow?

And they found when they plugged in a whole load of other data about socioeconomic factors, you know, price of wheat and how wealthy towns were, they found that the areas with more unrest were actually also those where it had a consequence.

The idea here being that perhaps there was a political element to it.

Interesting.

And finally, dinosaur news.

Yes, we have an absolutely spectacular looking dinosaur.

And here you go, here is a picture of it.

I thought you might like to see.

So this is from, it was found in Morocco.

It's from 165 million years ago.

The oldest fossil ever found of this species called Spicomellus apha.

I can see why it's called Spicomellus.

Yes.

So it has these metre long spikes around its neck in a collar.

It's got armour down the side and its tail is like a kind of medieval mace.

As well as being absolutely spectacular, what this fossil is showing us is that this armoured tail evolved about 30 million years before we thought.

And so, is this punky-looking dinosaur, is this a meat-eater or a herbivore?

It's a herbivore.

Okay, so this is don't eat me spikes.

Well, exactly.

What is it?

This is a great question because the more recent ankleosaurs, we think that their armour was about defence.

But actually, the fact that they were even bigger, further back in time, and more spectacular, and perhaps going beyond what they needed just to defend themselves, suggests that maybe they were more akin to deer's antlers.

Maybe these spikes were about impressing their mates, dinosaurs of the other sex, or to scare their rivals.

Right, that's us out of time, I'm afraid.

I'll be back next week with tales of a zoo full of poo that could help fight infections.

But for now, from me and Lizzie Gibney, bye for now.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

The producers were Ella Hubber, Jonathan Blackwell, and Claire Salisbury.

Technical production was by Searle Whitney and Duncan Hannant.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

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