Polynesian rat

Pacific rat (Rattus exulans )

The Pacific rat (Rattus exulans, also Small Pacific rat) is a rodent; it is the smallest of the culture following species of the genus of rats ( Rattus). Your Maori name is Kiore.

Features

Compared to the other rats, it has a shorter body, a more pointed snout, larger ears and getting a brown coat. Adult animals 11.5 to 15 cm from snout tip to the tail long and weigh 40 to 80 g The tail has numerous fine rings and is about as long as the body.

Way of life

The Pacific rat cope in various habitats such as steppes, rocky land and forest. You can easily climb trees, where they always find something to eat, but she is not a good swimmer. The Pacific rat is, like the brown rat and the black rat also crepuscular.

Nutrition

The Pacific rat feeds mainly on cereals such as rice and corn, sugar cane, coconut, cocoa and pineapple.

Reproduction

It will be brought to the world in a litter of four to nine animals normally are four litters a year.

History

The Pacific rat was probably widespread in the wake of the spread of the Lapita culture in Oceania.

Studies mitochondrial DNA ( mtDNA) show the Pacific rat, that the spread probably from Indonesia ( Halmahera ) by the people went out, and reached from here Micronesia, Fiji, Vanuatu and New Zealand. As the Pacific rat does not cross with the European rat, such studies in this animal are easier and meaningful to carry out than in dogs or humans.

Recent radiocarbon dating of bones of the Pacific rat, which could reach only as an accompaniment of people to New Zealand, for example, dating the earliest possible settlement of New Zealand by Māori on the 1280.

Probably the Pacific rat was used by the early settlers as a source of meat. Today it is widespread throughout Southeast Asia and Polynesia, where it is often kept as a pet or at least as a source of food. Their flesh is described as very tasty.

Harmful effect

The distribution of the Pacific rat led ( among other factors ) to the severe damage to the fragile ecosystems of the Pacific Islands. In their native fauna ground-breeding birds were particularly affected. Together with the over-hunting by humans that led to their extinction. With the beginning of the Lapita culture, the biological diversity of most islands is radically reduced.

Furthermore, damage taught at the later by Europeans entrained brown rat (R. norvegicus).