If you woke up as a flower one day and found yourself rubbed up against a rat, you mightn’t be all that pleased. However, new research has highlighted the possible role that rats may play as pollinators in habitats where they compete with birds for food resources, including nectar.

As they swipe the sugary goods from the clutches of birds, they get their grubby mitts covered in pollen before accosting the next flower. But could this supermarket sweep not constitute a pollination service, even if it is from an unlikely source? The possibility is discussed in a paper published in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology.

They’re fluffy, intelligent, and even giggle. The dream, no? And yet humans continue to have a tense relationship with rats. That they can proliferate like crazy, invading the habitats of native species and displacing them in the ecosystem is, perhaps, part of the PR breakdown with Rattus rattus.

This reservation towards rats is felt strongly in New Zealand, where invasive “ship rats” have decimated populations of numerous native bird species. Getting rid of rats is no small feat (though they did achieve it on a remote island of South Georgia) so moving attention towards interaction points is a good place to start when trying to protect birds from rats.

Taking this approach, researchers have often looked to seed masts being a popular pillar to pillage for birds and rats alike. However, this new paper highlights floral nectar as a possibly underappreciated opportunity for rat-bird interactions.

Using camera traps, the researchers on the paper monitored several clutches of mountain flax in a wetland area to see who swung by for a nibble. The resulting footage from nine days of filming showed that a rat (or rats) were indeed visiting the flax and appeared to be repeatedly drinkings its nectar across six separate evenings.

They only ever saw one rat at a time snacking on the nectar, so if it were the rogue behavior of one inspired individual or the shared activity of several isn’t clear. The same plants were visited by silvereyes and starlings, showing that these invasive and native species are competing for resources but whether the activity of the rats is significant enough to impede the birds requires further investigation.

Interestingly, the rats recorded weren’t destroying everything in their path (as is their usual MO) but actually moving across the flax without breaking or gnawing off flowers. The jaw movement caught on camera would also appear to indicate the animal was drinking rather than biting, an important distinction because it means the rat(s) may be visiting multiple flowers in a row, just like a bee on pollination patrol.

“Our observations revealed that the ship rat may serve as a novel pollinator to mountain flax,” wrote the study authors. “Avian species visiting flax are easily identified due to the bright orange-yellow pollen that adheres to their plumage. It is likely that this pollen also sticks to the fur of the rat visitors, and is vectored to other flowers as the rats feed.”

Who knows, maybe one day we’ll be educating our young people about the birds and the bees… and the rats?