Touan shrew pouch rat
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Touan shrew pouch rat ( Monodelphis touan ) |
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| Monodelphis touan | ||||||||||||
| ( Shaw , 1800) |
The Touan shrew rat ( Monodelphis touan ) lives in French Guiana , in northeastern Brazil in the state of Amapá , on the island of Marajó in the Amazon delta and south of the lower Amazon between the lower reaches of the Rio Tocantins and Rio Xingu and possibly also in Suriname .
description
Males reach a head trunk length of 13.8 to 17 cm, have a 7.9 to 9.5 cm long tail and reach a weight of 64 to 100 g. Females stay smaller and reach a head body length of 11.9 to 15.5 cm, have a 6.5 to 8.5 cm long tail and reach a weight of 40 to 66 g. The tail has a length of about 55% of the length of the head. The fur of the animals is colored gray on the back, reddish on the sides of the body and cream-colored on the belly, whereby the belly hairs have gray bases, so that a slightly gray tinge emerges. The hair is about 8 mm long on the back and about 4 mm on the belly. The head is reddish on the sides. The throat and chin are reddish. There is a gray band in the middle of the head and snout, which is often only indistinctly visible, but is wider in specimens south of the Amazon. Only the part of the tail close to the body is hairy. In animals south of the Amazon, the hairy section takes up 20% of the tail length, in those north of the Amazon it is 30 to 50% of the tail length. The hairless portion of the tail and paws are dark brown or gray. The ears are small, hairless, and dark brown or gray. Females do not have a pouch. The number of teats is unknown. The karyotype is 2n = 18, FN = 30.
Habitat and way of life
The Touan shrew pouch rat lives in moist primary and secondary forests , is diurnal and lives on the ground. It feeds mainly on insects. In addition, fruits are also eaten. So far nothing is known about the reproduction of the animals.
Systematics
The English naturalist George Shaw is considered to be the author of the first description of the Touan shrew rat , who described it in 1800 under the name Viverra touan, i.e. assigned it to the civet cats . For a long time the Touan shrew pouch rat was considered a subspecies of the Guiana shrew pouch rat ( Monodelphis brevicaudata ). In 2012 it finally received the status of an independent species, which was adopted in the marsupial volume of the Handbook of the Mammals of the World (published in 2015). Touan shrew-pouch rats north and south of the Amazon differ somewhat in color and morphology, but some specimens north of the Amazon are more similar to those from south of the Amazon than their conspecifics from the north. It is not yet clear whether the shrew pouch rats from Suriname also belong to this species.
status
The Touan shrew pouch rat is not yet regarded by the IUCN as an independent species and therefore does not provide any information about a possible degree of endangerment.
supporting documents
- ↑ a b c d Diego Astúa: Family Didelphidae (Opossums). in Don E. Wilson , Russell A. Mittermeier : Handbook of the Mammals of the World - Volume 5. Monotremes and Marsupials. Lynx Editions, 2015, ISBN 978-84-96553-99-6 . Page 149–150.
- ↑ Silvia Eliza Pavan, Rogerio Vieira Rossi, Horacio Schneider: Species diversity in the Monodelphis brevicaudata complex (Didelphimorphia: Didelphidae) inferred from molecular and morphological data, with the description of a new species. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, Volume 165, Issue 1, May 2012, Pages 190-223, doi: 10.1111 / j.1096-3642.2011.00791.x