Native mice and rats

196 Pages·8.387 MB·English

by  Breed B., Ford F.

AUSTRALIAN NATURAL HISTORY SERIES
AUSTRALIAN NATURAL HISTORY SERIES
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Lochman Transparencies D RAT
Photos courtesy Jiri Lochman, S

Australia’s native rodents are the most ecologically diverse family of Australian mammals.

There are about 60 living species – all within the subfamily Murinae – representing around
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25 per cent of all species of Australian mammals.They range in size from the very small
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delicate mouse to the highly specialised,arid-adapted hopping mouse,the large tree rat and L
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the carnivorous water rat.
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Native Mice and Ratsdescribes the evolution and ecology of this much-neglected group of R
animals.It details the diversity of their reproductive biology,their dietary adaptations and social E
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behaviour.The book also includes information on rodent parasites and diseases,and concludes D
by outlining the changes in distribution of the various species since the arrival of Europeans as
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well as current conservation programs.
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Bill Breed is an Associate Professor at The University of Adelaide.He has focused his research
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on the reproductive biology of Australian native mammals,in particular native rodents and R
dasyurid marsupials.Recently he has extended his studies to include rodents of Asia and Africa. E
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Fred Fordhas trapped and studied native rats and mice across much of northern Australia
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and south-eastern New South Wales.He currently works for the CSIRO Australian National O
Wildlife Collection.
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BILL BREED AND FRED FORD
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AUSTRALIAN NATURAL HISTORY SERIES
N AT I V E M I C E
A N D R AT S
BILL BREED AND FRED FORD
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© Bill Breed and Fred Ford 2007
All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian
Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright
owner. Contact CSIRO PUBLISHING for all permission requests.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Breed, Bill.
Native mice and rats.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 9780643091665 (pbk.).
1. Mice – Australia. 2. Rats – Australia. I. Ford, Fred.
II. Title. (Series : Australian natural history series).
599.35
Published by
CSIRO PUBLISHING
150 Oxford Street (PO Box 1139)
Collingwood VIC 3066
Australia
Telephone: [phone]
Local call: 1300 788 000 (Australia only)
Fax: [phone]
Email: [email protected]
Web site: www.publish.csiro.au
Front cover: Spinifex hopping mouse emerging from burrow
Back cover (clockwise from top left): Golden-backed tree rat, delicate mouse,
western pebble-mound mouse, desert mouse
(photos by Jiri Lochman/Lochman Transparencies)
Set in 10.5/14 Palatino
Cover and text design by James Kelly
Typeset by Palmer Higgs
Printed in Australia by Ligare
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CONTENTS
Preface and acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction 1
2 Diversity 15
3 Distribution 39
4 Origins and evolution 55
5 Reproduction 87
6 Diet and gastrointestinal tract 101
7 Populations and communities 115
8 Social organisation and behaviour 125
9 Parasites and disease (by Andrew Breed) 139
10 Conservation 149
Glossary 164
Bibliography 167
Index 177
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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been written by two biologists with very different backgrounds.
Both of us, however, share a love of the natural world and have studied the
biology of Australia’s native mice and rats extensively. We have both become
fascinated by their diversity and the evolutionary relationships between the
species within this group.
The book is the product of many years’ work and has had a gestation
period of over six years. It is an attempt to summarise the information
obtained about this group of mammals during the last 25 or so years. There
are around 60 species of living rodents in Australia today. At least seven
others have become extinct since the arrival of Europeans. It is perhaps
surprising that the native mice and rats seem to have suffered as much, if not
more, than the marsupials during this time.
One would have thought that by now the taxonomy of the group would
have been thoroughly worked out, but this is not the case. Even the two
authors of this book had a bit of a tussle agreeing on a mutually acceptable
classification system. Almost everyone who has worked on the evolutionary
biology of these rodents agrees that there are two major groups: one, an
ancient group that has been in Australia for at least four million years and
the other a more recent group, the ancestors of which probably arrived here
one to two million years ago. However the relationships between and within
the members of the older group in particular are currently in a state of flux.
In Chapter 1 we briefly indicate the different taxonomies in the hope that
anyone familiar with any particular classification system will be able to relate
this to the others as well as to the one we have adopted. Not only is the
taxonomy of the major groups not universally agreed upon but, at the present
time, there are several species still awaiting formal description. For instance,
the delicate mouse, Pseudomys delicatulus, one of the first native rodents to be
discovered and which was illustrated by John Gould in his Mammals of
Australia in 1860, turns out to be two or possibly three species. Similarly,
whether the sole Australian species of prehensile-tailed rat is the same
species as one of the many species in Papua New Guinea is not known at this
stage. There is also a species of native rat in the genus Rattus that occurs in
central Queensland which has still has not been formally described.
In spite of these ‘unknowns’, it is clear that we do know far more about
the native mice and rats of this country than was the case when the last book,
The Rodents of Australia, by Chris Watts and Heather Aslin, was written on
this topic 25 years ago. In our book, we focus on information obtained since
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Native mice and rats
that time. Clearly a book of this nature, covering such a broad field, will
reflect the interests of the authors. We have tried to cover as much as
possible about the biology of these animals, but there will be some areas
that we have inadvertently neglected. One area of debate between us was
whether or not to mention individual research workers by name who we
believe have made a substantial contribution to the field. After some
discussion, we agreed not to do so, although at the end of the book we
give a reasonably extensive list of references for those who wish for more
detailed information. In the writing of this book we also debated whether
to use the formal Latin names of the individual species or the English
names. In an attempt to make the text easier to read for the non-specialist
we mostly opted for the latter but we included the Latin names together
with the English names in Chapters 1 and 2.
A constantly recurring theme in this book is that, despite the Old
Endemic rodents arriving in this country far more recently than marsupials
or monotremes, there is much diversity in their body form, in various
aspects of their ecology, behaviour and social organisation, the food they
eat and the associated dental morphology and the proportions of the rest
of the gastro-intestinal tract, as well as their reproductive biology. In fact,
diversity in body form and function seems to be the hallmark of this Old
Endemic group of mice and rats. Rodents clearly have a very different
origin from that of the two other groups of land-dwelling mammals, the
marsupials and monotremes. They entered Australia from Asia and were
the only land mammals to manage the sea crossing from South-East Asia
until humans followed several million years later. Since the rodents arrived
on this landmass they have adapted to most of the continent’s natural
environments and contribute a very important component of biodiversity
that complements, rather than clashes, with the older marsupial and
monotreme species.
Australian native rodents do not adapt well to disturbance of their
habitats and unlike rodents in some other parts of the world, they have
not become pest species except for a few localised cases. It is the introduced
house mouse, not a native rodent, which causes millions of dollars’
damage in the grain-growing areas of southern Australia. Only in the
sugar cane fields of north Queensland have any species of native rodent
caused any major economic loss. This contrasts markedly with the damage
caused by native rodents of South-East Asia and, to a lesser extent, Africa.
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Preface and acknowledgements
If this book enhances awareness of this relatively little known group of
mammals that makes up around 25 per cent of all mammal species of
Australia, and this increased knowledge results in a greater effort to
conserve what is left of this important native mammal group, then we will
be well pleased and feel that one of our main aims has been achieved.
A book of this nature would not have been possible without the help
of a number of people. In particular, we would like to thank Andrew
Breed of The University of Queensland for writing Chapter 9 on parasites
and disease and Mike Kokkin of The University of South Australia for
allowing us to reproduce his unpublished diagrams of the gastrointestinal
tracts. Alice MacDougall generously contributed some of the line
drawings of rodent genera. Many colleagues at The University of Adelaide
helped in a variety of ways. In particular, we would like to thank Chris
Leigh and Tavik Morgenstern of the Discipline of Anatomical Sciences,
Faculty of Health Sciences; Peter Self and Lyn Waterhouse of Adelaide
Microscopy for assistance with the microscopy; numerous honours and
PhD students of The University of Adelaide, as well as Brian Miller, and
Matthew and Martin Breed, who acted as assistants on various field trips.
Over the years a number of specimens were kindly given to us by Chris
Watts and Peter Baverstock who, at that time, worked at the field station
of the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, at Gilles Plains. To all
these individuals we extend our sincere thanks. The Australian Museum
and CSIRO Australian National Wildlife Collection kindly allowed us
access to their rodent collections and Steve Van Dyck of The Queensland
Museum and David Stemmer of The South Australian Museum kindly
loaned us skeletal material. In addition we thank Melissa Bauer, Peter
Bird, Ron Sinclair, Mike Thompson, Clive Crouch, Steve Morton, Mark
Adams, Ben Luxton, Jenny Washington, Eleanor Peirce, Helen Owens
and John Reid for assisting us in various ways. Several people have
provided photographs that we have included in this book. In particular
we would like to thank Tony Robinson, Peter Canty, Jiri Lochman, Linda
Broome, Uli Kloecker, Jim Forrest, Steve Doyle, Dave Taggart, Libby Olds,
Jim Parke and Mike Cermak for the photographs they provided.
We would also like to thank the Gomboc Gallery for giving us permission
to include the drawings by Ella Fry.
Thanks also to James Menzies, Robert Brandle and Ian Hume who
critically read various chapters. We should especially like to extend our
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