The myth has most likely been debunked by a statistician, and in reality humans greatly outnumber the rodents.

The urban legend claiming there are more rat than humans in New York City appears to have been debunked.

According to statistician Jonathan Auerbach, humans outnumber rats at a ratio of four-to-one.

While Auerbach's numbers aren't exact, they're most likely the closest anyone has gotten to determining the actual rat population in the Big Apple.

When it comes to finding out how many animals are in a specific location, researchers normally will catch a portion of the species, tag them, and release them.

After a certain amount of time has passed, they'll capture another set of animals and see how many were previously tagged. From there, they come up with a population estimate.

Even though it's worked for other experiments, New York's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene preferred captured rats not to be freed again, so a different approach had to be taken.

Auerbach instead looked at how many rat sighting were reported to the help hotline 311 during the first half of 2010, and the first half of 2011.

Based on the reports, Auerbach calculated that of the 842,000 city property lots, 40,500 of them had a rodent infestation.

He took into account that a colony usually contains 40 to 50 rats, and came up with an estimated population of 2 million rats in the city.

While not concrete, it provides a more realistic figure that Auerbach actually believes may still be too high.

Residents of New York City can at least rest assured that the number of rats is much lower than the originally assumed 8.4 million.