When startled or cornered, they can be mean, too, sinking their sharp orange teeth clear through a fisherman's waders. The nutria, a member of the rodent family, looks like a beaver in front and a giant rat in back, has wiry whiskers, webbed back feet and can grow as big as a hefty housecat, up to 40 inches long and 20 pounds. "People call and say, 'I've got this big rat in my yard and I need it out of here now,'" Robertson says. One of 20 animal control officers is usually dispatched to set traps for the furry offenders, who generally live near water but stray on occasion. The spring and summer months are peak times for nutria-related calls at Dallas' animal control office, which receives an average of 50 such communiqués a year, senior animal control manager Kent Robertson says. Wildlife experts speculate the nutria made their way to urban locales such as Bachman Lake, White Rock Lake and other area bodies of water through the city's drainage system. stomping grounds, Dallas appears as good a place as any for the buck-toothed, semi-aquatic migrants, who have settled all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area. With their native land of Argentina too far away for swimming or travel by webbed foot, and a bounty on their ratlike tails in Louisiana, their notorious U.S. You know it's springtime in Dallas when the crepe myrtles begin to bloom, native wildflowers start their sprouting and the nutria waddle from their drainage pipes and sewers to frolic like kittens in the warm air. Nutria can survive in lakes where little else can, and they reproduce and look like ratsgiant ones, anyway, with sharp orange buck teeth. The scourge of Louisiana has found a happy home in Dallas' man-made lakes
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