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NATIVE MICE and RATS BILL BREED and FRED FORD NATIVE MICE and RATS Photos Courtesy Jiri Lochman,Transparencies Lochman AUSTRALIAN NATURAL HISTORY SERIES AUSTRALIAN NATURAL HISTORY SERIES NATIVE MICE AND RATS BILL BREED AND FRED FORD BILL BREED AND RATS MICE NATIVE NATIVE MICE AND RATS Photos courtesy Jiri Lochman,Transparencies Lochman 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 25 per cent of all species of Australian mammals.They range in size from the very small delicate mouse to the highly specialised, arid-adapted hopping mouse, the large tree rat and the carnivorous water rat. Native Mice and Rats describes the evolution and ecology of this much-neglected group of animals. It details the diversity of their reproductive biology, their dietary adaptations and social behaviour. The book also includes information on rodent parasites and diseases, and concludes by outlining the changes in distribution of the various species since the arrival of Europeans as well as current conservation programs. Bill Breed is an Associate Professor at The University of Adelaide. He has focused his research on the reproductive biology of Australian native mammals, in particular native rodents and dasyurid marsupials. Recently he has extended his studies to include rodents of Asia and Africa. Fred Ford has trapped and studied native rats and mice across much of northern Australia and south-eastern New South Wales. He currently works for the CSIRO Australian National Wildlife Collection. BILL BREED AND FRED FORD NATIVE MICE AND RATS Native Mice 4thpp.indd i 15/11/07 2:22:35 PM Native Mice 4thpp.indd ii 15/11/07 2:22:36 PM AUSTRALIAN NATURAL HISTORY SERIES NATIVE MICE AND RATS BILL BREED AND FRED FORD Native Mice 4thpp.indd iii 15/11/07 2:22:37 PM © 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: +61 3 9662 7666 Local call: 1300 788 000 (Australia only) Fax: +61 3 9662 7555 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 Native Mice 4thpp.indd iv 15/11/07 2:22:37 PM 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 Native Mice 4thpp.indd v 15/11/07 2:22:38 PM Native Mice 4thpp.indd vi 15/11/07 2:22:38 PM 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 Native Mice 4thpp.indd vii 15/11/07 2:22:38 PM 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. viii Native Mice 4thpp.indd viii 15/11/07 2:22:38 PM 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.
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