China struck by plague of roughly 2 BILLION rats.

[BreweryYardRat]

And, no, that's not a typo.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070711-china-rats.html

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When the Yangtze River flooded on June 23, the water level rose in Dongting Lake, which sits along the river south of Wuhan in central China's Hunan Province.

About two billion rodents have been coursing through the region, according to Chinese media reports, although it's not clear how this number was determined.

The rats have ravaged at least 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) of farmland by eating the roots and stems of crops, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported.

In response, several news reports note, residents in the district of Dahu have killed more than 2.3 million rats—or 90 tons of the rodents—since the invasion began.

To combat the problem, local authorities have distributed rat poison in the affected areas.
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Yeesh. They can't even control it with cats/dogs, because a: the government-distributed rat poison killed a lot of them, according to another article, and b: starving rats will attack their normal predators if the numbers are sufficiently in the rats' favor, as they are here.