What's the Latin for Rats Deserting a Sinking Ship?

Question: What's the Latin for Rats Deserting a Sinking Ship?

Is there a Latin expression like "rats deserting a sinking ship"?

Answer: Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, wrote about mice deserting a building when it was in imminent danger of collapse:

Ruinis inminentibus musculi praemigrant.
When ruin is imminent, the little rodents move away beforehand.
Book VIII.103 PROGNOSTICS OF DANGER DERIVED FROM ANIMALS

Editor/translator John Bostock says (1) Cicero alludes to this in his letters to Atticus and (2) Aelian writes about this in Anim. Nat. B. vi. c. 41; B. xi. c. 19; and Var. Hist. B. i. c. 11.

Deserting a falling house or sinking ship is an expression used to describe people abandoning a lost cause.

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