Mr McClean said the extra food allowed rats to rear as many as 10 babies, which would be sexually mature in three months.
“It’s a cycle that accelerates extremely quickly.
“The rubbish that’s built up is just providing ideal breeding conditions for them.
“Once all the rubbish has gone, the process is already started.”
Union and council representatives met for formal talks on Monday and said they would continue their negotiations on Tuesday.
They agreed to meet in an effort to resolve the dispute, which centres on a new pay system.
The decision came after informal meetings between refuse collectors and council staff last week.
The council said the joint agreement to hold talks was a “very positive sign”.
Overflowing rubbish left uncollected during the city’s bin strike could lead to an explosion in the rat population, a pest control expert has warned.
Sean McClean from Key West Pest Control said the mounting waste provided a steady food supply, which would boost rats’ breeding potential.
“I would expect the population boom to come in about 12 to 15 weeks,” he said.
Union and council officials have started official talks in an attempt to resolve the dispute.

Improvised explosive devices - IEDs - are the deadliest threat facing British forces in Afghanistan, and more resources than ever are being deployed to limit the threat of the Taliban’s tactic of choice.
The bleak and windswept land with its thin tufts of grass is criss-crossed with wires and oblong packages half-hidden in holes in the ground. We are warned not to get too close - the ground beneath our feet is riddled with explosives.
This is not Helmand, but Shoeburyness, Essex, where British army bomb disposal experts are doing their final training before they deploy to Afghanistan later this month with 11 Brigade.
Training to counter this threat has increased markedly over the past months, not only for bomb disposal experts but also for ordinary soldiers now acquiring more specialised counter-IED knowledge as part of basic training.
Just a few minutes later, when we are 100 yards (90m) or so away inside a concrete building, the earth shakes and a blast wave hits us. An enormous plume of smoke rises in the grey skies.
The men from 33 Engineer EOD Regiment have successfully blown up the devices.

Others wonder what revealing the names has achieved.
David Barnes, from the British Association of Social Workers, told the BBC the interests of the other children “have to come first”.
There are some disadvantages in that it may lead to yet another storm of opinion that actually doesn’t get to a real understanding of the case,” he said.
Wes Cuell, director of children’s services at the NSPCC, said there was a danger of the children being scrutinised by the press and perhaps bullied later on in life.
“We have to accept that the Baby Peter case is extraordinary in terms of the interest it has generated,” he said.
“There are children in the family who still have to grow up and what we need to make sure is that our interest in the case doesn’t lead to an unnecessary and prurient interest in their lives that is going to get in the way of their development.”
Roger Smith, director of Justice, the law reform and human rights organisation, said while the judge was right in law, the public did not need to know the names.
“The real issue is about the siblings,” he said. “We have an issue about their identity which I think is in danger of being smothered by all the anger about Tracey Connelly and the two men.”

Baby P’s mother Tracey Connelly, who was jailed indefinitely for her part in her son’s death, has dropped a bid to appeal against her sentence.
Peter Connelly died aged 17 months in Haringey, north London, in August 2007.
Connelly, 28, and partner Steven Barker were told they would serve minimum jail terms of five and 12 years. His brother Jason Owen was jailed for three years.
All three were initially refused leave to appeal against their sentences in September.
But the trio, who were all convicted of causing or allowing the boy’s death, were allowed to renew their applications to appeal.
Connelly, of Penshurst Road in Tottenham, north London, had been expected to have an appeal application heard by senior judges in the Court of Appeal on Tuesday.
Owen, 37, who had been staying at her home with his 15-year-old girlfriend, is expected to go ahead with his sentence appeal application.
Barker, 33, is due to have an appeal against a conviction for raping a two-year-old girl in a separate case heard by the Court of Appeal on 24 November.
He was given a life sentence for that offence and told he would serve at least 10 years.
Peter had more than 50 injuries, including fractured ribs and a broken back, when he was found dead at home in his cot.
Connelly and Barker’s names were made public in August following the expiry of an anonymity order.
A judge had previously ordered none of the defendants could be named because other children were still being placed with alternative carers.
Due to publicity surrounding the case, it is thought all three individuals convicted are likely to be given new identities upon release to protect them from vigilante attacks.
Critics have suggested there would be public anger if taxpayers’ money was used to protect them.

There is some debate as to whether innovation and creativity is suffering as game publishers become increasingly unwilling to back any project that lacks a built-in audience.
A glance at the games charts in the UK shows that most of the titles in the top 10 are either sequels or tied to a film.
Many have come from the EA stable, but it makes no apologies for sticking to a successful formula.
“The franchise strategy is good for the company, investors and consumers as this is a hit-driven business,” said Mr Brown.
He explained that EA had honed its franchise strategy, learning with every new version of a game. And he argued it also sat well with investors, who could forecast sales of a hit series.
“More importantly, it is good for the consumer as video games cost a lot of money to make and have a high price at retail,” he said. “If you buy three or four games a year, you don’t want to make a mistake.”
However, he admitted that there was a risk that a franchise could be exploited.
“I’m not going to say that every game is perfect,” admitted Mr Brown. “But if studios don’t deliver a high quality game, there is hell to pay internally.”

A review of US Army and Pentagon policies has been ordered by the defence secretary in the wake of a shooting at a military base.
The review will include Pentagon medical and personnel programmes, and US military base security.
Defence Secretary Robert Gates appointed a former Army secretary and an ex-Navy chief to report in 45 days.
The review is in addition to others into the Fort Hood shooting in which 13 people were killed.
Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, was shot by police during the incident on 5 November, and remains in hospital. He has been charged with 13 counts of murder.
“The shootings at Fort Hood raise a number of troubling questions that demand complete but prompt answers,” Mr Gates said at the Pentagon.
He said the review would look at ways to ensure the safety of military members and their families.

Looking ahead, it seems the UK industry should expect more consolidation to come.
Mr Kemp said: “I think the consolidation will be two-fold: consolidation of developers and consolidation of intellectual properties.
“Small publishers will not be able to compete ultimately with the big players.”
Many in the industry believe that the global games industry will eventually mirror the film industry, with a handful of giant publishers supplied by a limited number of developers who use smaller companies for specialist work.
Mr Rawlinson said: “In terms of development there is going to be a transition, but UK developers will find their strength.
“It will be like Hollywood where companies will come to the UK for certain core skills.
“UK development will end up providing those core skills such as games engines, or artificial intelligence, as well as creativity.”
He said the UK government was working to support the industry, but stopping short of subsidising it.
At E3 the Department of Trade and Industry worked with a number of firms to set up the UK State of Play stand.
Mr Rawlinson said: “There have been a number of movements through research and development tax credits recently that will support UK firms.
“It is trying to support the industry as best it can - through export and import missions, scoping new markets.
“At the end of the day, commercial companies have got to survive on their own terms.”
He said that the State of Play stand at E3 gave a focus to UK creativity.
“As an independent, you may be able to work on the world’s leading franchises but to come to E3 and stand out is very difficult.”

“We can compel companies to take product off the market. We also have the ability to change advertising, force companies to pull adverts and change them.
“And obviously we have the ability to revoke a rating if it’s not accurate.”
While the ESRB relies on voluntary industry effort, Australia’s Classification Board does not.
In fact, it is the Australian government that comes up with ratings guidelines for games. Those guidelines are based on “community standards, and what a “reasonable adult” would think of a given game.
The Classification Board is an independent body formed by an act of the Australian Parliament 11 years ago. It is made up of a dozen reviewers that are supposed to broadly reflect Australian society.
The Board receives applications from game publishers; it then applies what is known as an “impact test,” according to the Board’s acting deputy director, Jeremy Fenton.
“What we’re required to look at is a range of elements. They include violence, sex, language, drug use and nudity. So we look at those elements in context within the material.

Nasa is excited by the latest findings from its $2bn space telescope launched last August.
It cannot see objects the size of planets directly, but its infrared detectors can penetrate the dusty clouds around very young stars probing the regions in which planets are forming.
Spitzer has now detected significant amounts of icy organic materials sprinkled throughout these “planetary construction zones”.
These materials - icy dust particles coated with water, methanol and carbon dioxide - may help explain the origin of icy bodies like comets, the US space agency says.
Scientists believe such comets may have deposited on the primitive Earth water and many other chemicals that became the building blocks of life.
“These early results show Spitzer will dramatically expand our understanding of how stars and planets form,” said Dr Michael Werner, Spitzer project scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Astronomers from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) have helped to discover 10 new planets.
The discovery was announced at the Royal Astronomical Society’s largest ever National Astronomy Meeting at Queen’s.
The extrasolar planets - which orbit around other stars - were found by an international team using cameras in the Canary Islands and South Africa.
The Queen’s astronomers are using cameras designed and manufactured by Belfast company Andor Technology.
The Wide Area Search for Planets (SuperWasp) project uses two sets of cameras to watch for events known as transits, in which a planet passes directly in front of a star and blocks out some of its light, so from the Earth, the star temporarily appears a little fainter.
The cameras work as robots, surveying a large area of the sky at once.
Each night, astronomers have data from millions of stars which they check for transits. The transit method also allows scientists to deduce the size and mass of each planet.
Forty-five planets have now been discovered using the transit method, and since they were set up in 2004, the SuperWasp cameras have found 15 of them - making them the most successful discovery instruments for this type of work in the world.
Announcing the results was QUB’s Dr Don Pollacco.
Speaking before the meeting, he said: “SuperWasp is now a planet-finding production line and will revolutionise the detection of large planets and our understanding of how they were formed.
Queen’s and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council funded the first SuperWasp on La Palma; the camera was designed and built at Queen’s.”
Among the planets discovered using SuperWasp are WASP-12B.
A year - its orbital period - on WASP-12B is just 1.1 days. The planet is so close to its star that its daytime temperature could reach a searing 2,300C.
Scientists have found more than 270 extrasolar planets since the first one was discovered in the early 1990s, but the pace of discovery has been accelerated by SuperWasp technology.
The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council has changed its name to the Science and Technology Facilities Council. It is the main astronomy funding body in the UK.