Coconut-Cracking Giant Rat Discovered in Solomon Islands
Mammalogist Tyrone Lavery heard rumors of a giant, possum-like rat that lived in trees and cracked open coconuts with its teeth on his first trip to the Solomon Islands in 2010. After years of searching and a race against deforestation destroying the rat’s would-be home, Lavery, along with John Vendi and Hikuna Judge, finally found it.
“The new species, Uromys vika, is pretty spectacular — it’s a big, giant rat,” said Lavery, a post-doctoral researcher at The Field Museum in Chicago and the lead author of the Journal of Mammalogy paper announcing the rat’s discovery. “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.”This is an illustration of the new species, Uromys vika.
Credit: Velizar Simeonovski, The Field Museum
But years of searching didn’t turn up any of the giant rats. “I started to question if it really was a separate species, or if people were just calling regular black rats ‘vika,’”said Lavery. Part of what made the search so difficult was the rat’s tree-dwelling lifestyle. “If you’re looking for something that lives on the ground, you’re only looking in two dimensions, left to right and forward and backward. If you’re looking for something that can live in 30-foot-tall trees, then there’s a whole new dimension that you need to search,” explains Lavery.
Courtesy of Tyrone Lavery, The Field Museum
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). And from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, U. vika is about a foot and a half 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 rat’s giant size and possum-like tree-dwelling lifestyle 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. “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,” explains Lavery.
These are nuts bearing the characteristic tooth-marks of Uromys vika.
Courtesy of Tyrone Lavery, The Field Museum.
While the rat has only just been discovered, it will quickly be designated as Critically Endangered, due to its rarity and the threat posed by logging to its rainforest habitat. “It’s getting to the stage for this rat that, if we hadn’t discovered it now, it might never have gotten discovered. The area where it was found is one of the only places left with forest that hasn’t been logged,” says Lavery.
This study was completed by scientists at The Field Museum and the Zaira Resource Management Area.
Contacts and sources:
Kate Golembiewski
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2017/09/coconut-cracking-giant-rat-discovered.html
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Just a note, that the Solomon Islands are North/East of Australia (and not North/West of Australia).
hmm no pictures of a live one, one skull with nothing to indicate how big it is and some words.. YAWN! the Gambian pouched rat, which can measure nearly 3 feet from nose to tail end and weigh 3 lb