The marsh rice rat is a semiaquatic North American rodent in the family Cricetidae. It is found mostly in the eastern and southern United States, from New Jersey and Kansas south to Florida and northeasternmost Tamaulipas, Mexico. The species is infected by many different parasites and harbors a hantavirus that also infects humans.
About Marsh rice rat in brief
The marsh rice rat is a semiaquatic North American rodent in the family Cricetidae. It usually occurs in wetland habitats, such as swamps and salt marshes. It is found mostly in the eastern and southern United States, from New Jersey and Kansas south to Florida and northeasternmost Tamaulipas, Mexico. Several subspecies have been described since the 1890s, mainly from Florida, but disagreement exists over their validity. The species is infected by many different parasites and harbors a hantavirus that also infects humans. The specific name palustris is Latin for \”marshy\” and refers to the usual habitat of the species, in The Quadrupeds of North America, 1854. It was discovered in 1816 in South Carolina by John Bachman and formally described in 1837. In the U.S., it is the only oryzomyine rodent except for Oryzomys couesi in a small area of southern Texas. The name combines the Greek oryza and myza, which means “rice” or “rice rat” and “marsh” in Latin, and the Latin word for rice, “parshy”, which refers to its habit of eating rice. It can live for less than a year in the wild and is not of conservation concern, but some populations are threatened. It makes nests of sedge and grass, and occasionally builds runways. Its diverse diet includes plants, fungi, and a variety of animals, including the barn owl, and it usually lives for just a few weeks in thewild.
It has been classified as one of eight species in the genus OryZomys, which is distributed from the eastern United States into northwestern South America. The Florida Keys population is sometimes classified as a different species, the silver rice rat. Data from the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene indicate a deep divergence between populations east of Mississippi and those further west, which suggests that the western populations may be recognized as a separate species, Ory Zomys texensis. In 1854, Bachman redescribed it as Arvicola oryzivora, considering it more closely related to the voles of the genus Ar Vicola. Three years later, Spencer Fullerton Baird introduced a new generic name for the marsh Rice rat, Oriesomys. At the time, it was recognized as either a full genus or a subgenus of Ory zomus, or a full subgenal species, and later as a subspecies of Oriesonus oryzomus oryzomyini. In 2006, Marcelo Weksler and coworkers removed more than 40 species from the genus. All are placed in the subfamily Sigmodontinae, along with hundreds of other species of mainly small rodents, most of which occur in South and Central America. One of the only other sigmodontines present are several species of cotton rats in the southern half of the country.
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This page is based on the article Marsh rice rat published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
