Rat King: Photo of Grotesque Giant Rodent Shocks Swedes

Of late, rats thriving on the lots of food waste generated by urban dwellers have become a significant problem in Sweden's metropolitan areas, including the country's second-largest city of Gothenburg. The city's growing rat population sometimes produces grotesquely outsized monsters, one of which was recently captured on photograph.

The picture, which became an internet sensation, was made by park attendant Martina Gustafsson, who discovered the giant. By her own admission, she and her colleague saw two birds fighting over something. When they came closer, they were shocked to realize that it was a dead rat, and a humongous one at that. They were awestruck.

"They have grown something fierce. Partly because of the digging everywhere, but also because people have started throwing household garbage in our dustbins," Martina Gustafsson told the Swedish daily Expressen. "We have also seen restaurants dropping food waste, so it's no wonder that the rats are getting more and more," she added.

By Gustafsson's own admission, she once saw a still larger one feasting from a trash bin outside a hamburger restaurant.

"Its tail stuck out, and it was so fat it could not get out of the bin. I had to open the lid so that it could scuttle away," she said.

"I thought 'wow!' but at the same time it's hard to believe this. I'm not saying that the image is fake, but it appears even bigger the way the photograph is taken," Håkan Rystrand told SVT.

In 2014, the Swedish family Bengtsson-Korsås from the city of Solna rose to national fame after catching a 39.5 centimeter rat, which managed to gnaw a tunnel from the basement of the house through wood and concrete and survived a rat trap.

​Nevertheless, Rystrand admitted that the number of rats has increased dramatically over the past decade, which he attributed to fellow Swedes' habits.

"Bird feeding is a very big problem, especially the people who simply throw out boxes of bread or sunflower seeds. The rats prey on the leftovers," Rydstrand contended.

Meanwhile, an increase in urban rat populations has been noted across the Nordic country. In 2013, Anticimex implemented 30,350 sanitation missions against rats, and since then the number of raids has increased by 67 percent, SVT reported.

Rats are also known to spread diseases and have been "credited" with introducing the black plague to Europe in the 1300s after hitching a ride on merchant vessels from China, which has been recently revised.