A Rome zoologist says the Italian capital has become a “real jungle” due to high temperatures and the city’s ongoing garbage problem, with numbers of snakes, oriental hornets, seagulls and rats soaring.

Andrea Lunerti, known in Rome as a catcher of dangerous animals, said he has been inundated with calls this summer, mostly about snake sightings.

“There are a lot more snake sightings than before,” Lunerti said. “The snake population has grown exponentially in the winter because the temperatures have been so warm. If it had been cold, they wouldn’t have survived. Then they come from their natural habitat to the city because there is a lot of food waste, and where there is food waste, there are rats – their main prey.”

The most common snake species in Rome is the green whip snake, although Lunerti also caught four vipers.

On Friday morning, he received a call from a traumatized woman after a green whip snake fell on her terrace. Recently, he was also called by the police, who asked him to remove a snake found in the doctors’ dressing room of a hospital in the Parioli district.

“You can find them on terraces, in gardens, in school buildings,” he said. “One was even hanging on the grate of an elevator in a residential building, causing great panic. The snakes are very adept at finding hiding places in buildings and waiting for the right moment to disappear and hunt their prey.”

Lunerti asks his callers to send him videos of the snakes so he can determine whether they are poisonous or not. “But even the non-poisonous ones cause chaos because they make people panic and then make them do dangerous things, like running across the road without looking.”

The Oriental hornet, a species of wasp that migrated from North Africa and Southeast Asia, has also been heavily present in Rome since 2021. They were first spotted in the Monteverde district, but soon nests began to sprout in the niches of shutters, ventilation shafts, air conditioning units and even in the cracks of ancient monuments in the city center.

Their increasing spread is also attributed to higher temperatures and garbage.

Lunerti said: “Rome really needs to get its waste management under control, otherwise we will see more snakes and hornets, not to mention the rats and seagulls – there are more seagulls in Rome than in Fregene (a nearby coastal town).”

He said the seagulls had at least helped reduce the number of rats and snakes. “One snake was caught by a seagull and thrown onto a terrace,” he said. “The city has become a real jungle.”

The Rome City Council said there was “no jungle” and that reports of snakes and other animal species “give no cause for concern”.

The city council also denies that there is a connection between snakes and garbage, quoting zoologist Enrico Alleva as saying: “Some species of rat predators are more active at this time because they hunt rats. When the city is empty, they become more active because there is less garbage.”

The councillor said that data from Ama, the company that manages garbage collection in Rome, showed that the service had improved and that there had been a significant reduction in waste so far in 2024 compared to other years. “This allows us to say that the cleanliness of the city is better than it has been for years,” it said.