A new rodent species with an unusual lifestyle has been discovered on Vangunu — an island, part of the New Georgia Islands in the Solomon Islands — by an international team of researchers.
This is an illustration of Uromys vika. Image credit: Velizar Simeonovski, Field Museum.
This new rat was found by Dr. Tyrone Lavery, a mammalogist at the Field Museum in Chicago, and Hikuna Judge of the Solomon Islands’ Zaira Resource Management Area.
Named Uromys vika, the new species is the first new rodent from Solomon Islands in more than 80 years.
“Uromys vika is pretty spectacular — it’s a big, giant rat. It’s the first rat discovered in 80 years from Solomons, and it’s not like people haven’t been trying — it was just so hard to find,” Dr. Lavery said.
The giant rat is known from a single specimen captured in the Dillenia salomonensis tree on Vangunu Island.
“Vika are a lot bigger than the black rats that spread throughout the world with European colonists — the rats you’ll see in American alleys weigh around 200 grams (0.44 pounds), Solomon Islands rats can be more than four times that size, weighing up to a kilogram (2.2 pounds),” Dr. Lavery said.
“And from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, the new species is about 45 cm (1.5 feet) long.”
“And while they haven’t yet been observed cracking open coconuts, they do have a penchant for chewing circular holes into nuts to get at the meat.”
The giant size and possum-like tree-dwelling lifestyle of Uromys vika can be traced back to its island home.
“Islands are full of animals found nowhere else on earth that evolved in isolation from the rest of the world,” Dr. Lavery said.
“Vika’s ancestors probably rafted to the island on vegetation, and once they got there, they evolved into this wonderfully new species, nothing like what they came from on the mainland.”
According to the team, Uromys vika is rare and cryptic, and should be categorized as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List, ‘due to its small distributional range, apparent low population densities, and rapid progress of commercial logging on Vangunu Island.’
The new rodent is described in a paper published in the Journal of Mammalogy.
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Tyrone H. Lavery & Hikuna Judge. A new species of giant rat (Muridae, Uromys) from Vangunu, Solomon Islands. Journal of Mammalogy, published online September 27, 2017; doi: 10.1093/jmammal/gyx116
