Latest news with #Mammalia
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A Mysterious Rat Vanished Into the Mountains in 1989. It Just Showed Its Face for the First Time Since.
Here's what you'll learn about when you read this story. Mallomys istapantap is the largest (and also least studied) species of woolly rat in New Guinea, and it has finally been documented in photos and on video. This species was first documented in 1989, but in their attempts to further study the creature, researchers had little to go off of other than a handful of museum specimens. The knowledge preserved by local Indigenous people suggests that only sightings of the M. istapantap by scientists—and not the species itself—are rare. Not all rats are sewer or subway denizens skittering away with someone's slice of pizza (and then going viral for it). In the remote mountain rainforests of Papua New Guinea, there is a creature that has managed to elude humans for decades—a giant rat that hides in the leafy shadows and has never known a discarded pizza crust. Meet Mallomys istapantap, the Subalpine Woolly Rat of New Guinea. This behemoth of a rodent can easily grow to be the size of a house cat and reach lengths of 85 centimeters (or 33 inches). Several different species of woolly rat have been found in the region, but M. istapantap is easily the largest, and the least studied. It is also one of the largest rodents in the world, next to species such as pacarenas and capybaras. Now, zoologist František Vejmělka has become the first to document this mysterious nocturnal rodent in the wild, catching the creature on both photo and video as it scurries down a tree branch at just past sunset. 'It seems that the rarity of the Subalpine Woolly Rat in museum collections and the limited knowledge on its ecology do not reflect its true rarity in nature, but are rather connected only to the remoteness of the habitats it occupies and to the fact that it cannot be recorded by standard methods of small rodent trapping,' Vejmělka said in a study recently published in the journal Mammalia. Isolated island habitats can lead to the evolution of some exotic and unusual fauna. Along with outsize rats, New Guinea is home to birds of paradise, iridescent snakes, fanged frogs, grunting fish, tree kangaroos, and several rare species of echidna that exist nowhere else on Earth. Mallomys is a whole genus endemic to the island, and consists of four species of woolly rat. The other species have slightly better documentation, but M. istapantap was first described in 1989 and only visually documented through an illustration in 1995. Until now, the only way to study it up close has been through a handful of museum specimens. M. istapantap is an herbivore that eats mostly ferns and lives in mossy forests or grasslands near the mountains. It is mostly terrestrial—though still able to climb trees if it needs to escape predators—and its thick and shaggy fur keeps it from feeling the chill of high elevations. The species name 'istapantap' is Melanesian Pidgin (spoken by the local Indigenous people) and means 'living above' or 'it is on the top.' This knowledge of the creature's existence shows that it is probably glimpsed regularly among the roots and leaves by locals. Hunters who helped Vejmělka collect samples seemed to know areas where he was most likely to find M. istapantap, though population numbers are still unknown. In addition to having local hunters as his guides, Vejmělka set up a camera trap on a fallen log over a stream in a dense forest on Mount Wilhelm—the highest mountain in New Guinea. The camera ran for eight nights until a male M. istapantap, eyes shining in the darkness, was filmed crawling across the log. Woolly rat species that live in lower elevations have longer tails, while those in higher elevations have shorter tails—an axiom that also applies to the white-tipped tail of M. istapantap. They have dark, brownish-grayish fur with white undersides and pale feet, and females are slightly larger than males. Vejmělka also discovered a color variation never seen before in the species (or any rodent species in the Hydromyini group of rodents, for that matter), which features a streak of yellow on the chest that he thinks is either genetic or staining from sebaceous glands. (This might be related to territorial behavior.) 'The results presented here show primarily the persisting importance of conducting field expeditions in the present, particularly to understudied regions of the Earth,' said Vejmělka. 'The combination of modern and traditional detection methods […] resulted in the first specimen records of this remarkable rodent in over 30 years.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Elusive woolly rat photographed for the first time
New Guinea's subalpine woolly rat is the rodent of legends. Mallomys istapantap was first described in 1989, but even then the descriptions were only gleaned from examining historical museum material. The last recorded sighting of the fuzzy rodent 30 years ago failed to yield any photographic evidence, but after six months scouring the jungles of New Guinea, one researcher has finally documented one of the world's most elusive mammals. The New Guinean woolly rat doesn't make itself easy to find, but Czech Academy of Sciences doctoral candidate František Vejmělka recently managed to make history with the help of local guides. 'If it weren't for the indigenous hunters who accompanied me in the mountains and helped me locate the animals, I would never have been able to collect this data,' Vejmělka said in a statement. Vejmělka collaborated with multiple local tribes to survey the region around Papua New Guinea's highest peak, Mount Wilhelm (14,793 ft). Along the way he documented and genetically identified 61 species of non-flying rodents and marsupials, but it was his firsthand encounters with the woolly rat that stood out from the rest. The murine rodent lives in the region's remote, steep highlands at elevations around 12,000 feet. They only emerge at night to feed on plant matter and spend their days in underground burrows or high in the tree canopies. Vejmělka's documentation published last month in the journal Mammalia notes the thick-furred woolly rats measure about 2.78-feet long including their tail, weigh around 4.4 lbs, and feature 3-inch paws. Despite their moderate size, the university announcement describes the animal as a 'striking and formidable creature.' While tropical biodiversity across Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia is well-studied, the Australasian regions remain largely unstudied. Collaborating with local indigenous communities to find and document animals such as the woolly rat is crucial to help strengthen biodiversity and conservation efforts, and what is needed to protect them from outside threats. 'It's astonishing that such a large and striking animal has remained so poorly studied,' said Vejmělka. 'How much more is there to discover about the biodiversity of tropical mountains?'
New York Times
31-01-2025
- Science
- New York Times
This Carnivore Turned Up in Egypt After Vanishing 5,000 Years Ago
The animal killed two goats belonging to residents of Wadi Yahmib, a village within the sparsely populated Elba Protected Area of Egypt. To protect their livestock, the villagers chased down the carnivore in a pickup truck and killed it. When Abdullah Nagy, a zoologist at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, received a video of the hunt from a colleague who was in the region, he thought he was being pranked. 'I was asking, 'Where are you actually? Because that species doesn't exist in our country,'' Dr. Nagy said. ''Are you sure that you didn't cross into Sudan or something?'' Additional photos offered persuasive proof: A spotted hyena had crossed into Egypt, about 300 miles north of the nearest known population of the animals in Sudan. The observation of the hyena is the first record of the oft-misunderstood mammal in Egypt in 5,000 years. Two other hyena species — the striped hyena and the aardwolf — can be found in Egypt. But spotted hyenas went extinct in the country millenniums ago as the regional climate became dryer and more arid. Warthogs and zebras also disappeared from Egypt at this time. Dr. Nagy, Said El-Kholy and two other colleagues published details of the encounter in the journal Mammalia this month. While Dr. Nagy said the hyena sighting left him in 'disbelief,' Christine Wilkinson, a carnivore ecologist and hyena specialist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the California Academy of Sciences, wasn't fazed in the slightest. 'To be honest with you, spotted hyenas cannot surprise me,' she said. 'They are just incredibly behaviorally flexible animals that can make it work in all different circumstances.' Spotted hyenas have a reputation for being scavengers, but they actually hunt most of the food they eat themselves. They live in large, complex matriarchal societies called clans, which are similar to the social groups of some primates like baboons. Adept problem solvers, they can make do on a diet of caterpillars or prey on baby elephants, Dr. Wilkinson said. Some even live among people, as they do in Harar, an Ethiopian city where they are fed and revered by locals. Spotted hyenas are the largest of the four living hyena species and are found throughout sub-Saharan Africa; in regions where other big predators on the continent are struggling, the hyenas seem to be holding firm. 'What we're discovering is that the spotted hyenas are doing really quite well, probably better than the other large carnivores' like lions, leopards and cheetahs, said Andrew Jacobson, a conservation biologist at Catawba College in North Carolina. That seemed to be reflected in Dr. Nagy and his colleagues' research. To figure out how the hyena might have made the journey into Egypt, they analyzed satellite images of the vegetation in the area. They found that the region, normally dry and forbidding, has been in a recent wet period, which has led to more plant growth and, potentially, more herbivores like gazelles for hyenas to hunt. Dr. Jacobson, Dr. Wilkinson and other colleagues are working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature to update a spotted hyena range map. The team hopes to submit the new map for publication sometime this year, Dr. Jacobson said. Though some spotties, as Dr. Wilkinson calls them, are doing well, others seem to be struggling. Dr. Jacobson said there are possible declines of the hyenas in parts of west and central Africa. One of the biggest threats to the animals is conflict with humans, as the fate of the Egyptian hyena shows. When hyenas kill livestock, Dr. Wilkinson said, people often feel that they have to kill them to protect their livelihoods. 'They can't take the risk to lose their one cow or their small herd of goats to hyenas,' she added. 'It's a very complicated issue.' Though this spottie's trip to Egypt had an abrupt end, the animal will live on, in a way, in the country. When Dr. Nagy first learned that the hyena had been killed, he asked people in Wadi Yahmib to bury it to protect it from decomposing. He hopes to travel to the village next month to collect the skeleton and bring it back to his university's museum for study. 'I wouldn't be able to dissect it, because it will be decayed,' Dr. Nagy said. 'The skeleton itself would provide very valuable insights.'
