Mice and rats are from the same general family, they are both rodents and both have incisors that grow constantly throughout their life and they actually look very similar as well. The main differences are the physical size and the tail. Rat tails are hairless and used to help them swim. Mice cannot swim and will drown in water. A rat can tread water for three days straight and can hold its breath for a full 180 seconds. Three minutes, underwater with a very fast swim speed. These rats are referred to as sewer rats. Their true name is Norway Rats, they came on ships to our country and do not have any natural predators here. The Norway rat is the most common type of rat just as the house mouse is the most common type of mouse. Both species like human food and will eat out of your garbage if it is not protected properly. They will both enter your home but rats do not want to stay. They will look for food and things to make a nest within your home and then take it out into your back yard where they will have made a burrow.
Mice will move into your home and stay there permanently. Generally, a pregnant female will try to sneak into your home and get into the walls to make a nest in the insulation. While house mice will do this at any time of year the rates of infestation do go up rapidly as the winter approaches. The mouse will give birth and those children will mate and produce a large family very quickly. In the span of a month a single mouse can become a full infestation. This is why prevention is the best way to deal with both mice and rats.
It is also important to note that mice and rats have been sharing space with humans for much longer than most people realize. Humanity became agrarian, as in we started controlling and modifying our own food sources, other animals started showing up. Animals that did not know how to aggregate food and store it for long periods. Most would starve in the winter without the food they could steal from humans. This became a common act for smaller animals that had many predators. Living in a human camp meant they were safe from larger animals eating them because the humans had a fire. They also had tons of food. Too much food and they would cast the food onto the ground when they were done with it. The mice and rats would snatch the food and run off to their dens. Other animals, larger ones would try to steal our food but they could not hide as well and learned to avoid us. Mice are also terrified of rats as rats eat mice.
Mice continued to stay with us while rats deviated due to their size. Mice are so small and silent that they can invade a human home and stay there for years without the humans realizing. Rats will only come to a property if it has a large amount of water. If you have a water feature like a birdbath, coy pond or waterfall feature then rats will want to come to your property. They need to drink water constantly and this is one of the biggest differences between mice and rats. Mice can go three years without drinking water which is incredible. They are very dry animals that actually avoid water as they cannot swim. Rats on the other hand have become very good swimmers and love the water. They have a very high water content that causes them to rot for a very long time when they die. This is something commercial exterminators will try to prevent, rats dying in your walls is a disaster that will cost thousands to fix. Mice can die in the wall and will desiccate in most situations which makes it safe for them to do so.
