Garden shrew
| Garden shrew | ||||||||||||
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Garden shrew |
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Crocidura suaveolens | ||||||||||||
| ( Pallas , 1811) |
The garden shrew ( Crocidura suaveolens ) is a mammal from the shrew family . It inhabits large parts of the Palearctic .
Mark
The garden shrew is the smallest of the three species of white-toothed shrews found in Europe (genus Crocidura ). The head-trunk length is 50 to 75, rarely up to 80 millimeters, the tail length 25 to 40 millimeters and the weight 4.0 to 7.5 grams. The top is brown-gray, the flanks and the underside are gray and occasionally tinged with yellow. The color of the underside and the upper side is not clearly set off from one another.
distribution
The garden shrew's huge range covers large parts of the Palearctic . It extends in a west-east direction from Portugal and Brittany to the east of Siberia and in a north-south direction in the western part of the area from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania to the southern tip of Italy , in the north of Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula and in the east south to Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan and North China . The populations that used to belong to this species in southeast Siberia, east China, Korea and Taiwan are now considered to be a separate species ( Crocidura shantungensis ).
In south-western Europe, northern Portugal, northern Spain and south-western France are populated. A large distribution gap then follows to the east, extending from central France via western Italy and Switzerland and the Benelux countries to central and eastern Germany. The north-western distribution limit in Europe runs through Germany roughly along a line from Stuttgart , Lower Franconia , Thuringia and Neuruppin in the central state of Brandenburg to Pasewalk in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania . This northern limit of distribution continues in the west of Poland , where it turns further east but again south, so that the species is absent in north-east Poland.
habitat
The garden shrew inhabits forest-free, extensively used and warm open habitats such as fallow land, fields and roadsides, silted vegetation, gardens, rubble heaps and dry stone walls from the plains up to a height of about 700 meters. The species often lives - and almost exclusively in the north of the range - near human settlements. From September onwards, the animals increasingly migrate into buildings in order to overwinter there.
Way of life
The food mainly consists of insects and their larvae, harvestmen , spiders and snails . Because they also eat snails, they are useful in the vegetable garden, like hedgehogs in natural snail control. Reproduction takes place from April to October. The litters include 2 to 8, mostly 4 to 5 young. The freshly born young mice weigh 0.4 to 0.6 grams. The eyes open at nine days of age; the suckling period is about three weeks. During their excursions, the young mice form the caravans typical of many eyelash shrews from the age of eight days by biting into the tail root of the front animal .
Existence and endangerment
In Germany, the garden shrew is listed as “endangered” (category 3) on the Red List due to its close ties to extensively used, open habitats and the endangerment of these habitats due to increased use . At the western border of the distribution it is apparently also displaced by the house shrew advancing to the east . On the other hand, at least in East Germany, there has been a significant expansion of the area to the north and west since 1955. According to the IUCN, the world population is considered to be safe ( least concern ).
The species is no longer kept in European zoos, the former German owner is Berlin.
swell
supporting documents
- ↑ Engelbert Kötter: Snails in the natural garden, Cadmos Verlag 2014, ISBN 978-3-840-48111-6 + e-book 3840465443
- ↑ [1] ZTL 11.6.
literature
- Anthony J. Mitchell-Jones, Giovanni Amori, Wieslaw Bogdanowicz, Boris Krystufek, PJH Reijnders, Friederike Spitzenberger, Michael Stubbe, Johan BM Thissen, Vladimiŕ Vohralik, Jan Zima: The Atlas of European Mammals. Poyser, London, 1999, ISBN 0-85661-130-1 , pp. 72-73.
- Axel Schmidt: On the history of the distribution of the garden shrew Crocidura suaveolens in East Germany. In: Nature conservation and landscape maintenance in Brandenburg. Vol. 7, No. 1, 1998, ISSN 0942-9328 , pp. 49-52, (PDF; 6.5 MB).
- Erwin Stresemann (founder), Konrad Senglaub (ed.): Excursion fauna of Germany. Volume 3: Vertebrates. 12th, heavily edited edition. G. Fischer, Jena et al. 1995, ISBN 3-334-60951-0 , p. 374.
Web links
- Crocidura suaveolens in the endangered Red List species the IUCN 2010. Posted by: R. Hutterer u. a., 2008. Retrieved October 31, 2010.