Endangered
Alpine woolly rat
Mallomys gunung
Alpine woolly rat is a rodent in the family Muridae (order Rodentia) — Mallomys gunung, recorded as Endangered.
Range and habitat
It is found only in West Papua, Indonesia. It is found only at high elevations, has an extent of occurrence less than 5,000 km2, and is known from only two localities (although may be present at more). This species is very likely to be increasingly affected by global warming, that increases fire frequency and is causing the extent of habitat to decline.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The combination of hunting, predation, and slow breeding means that the population size is probably declining (has certainly declined substantially according to the Holocene fossil records). Because very little is known about the Alpine woolly rat, its diet is assumed to be similar to that of a typical wild rats, barring climate variations.
In crisis
When specimens were brought to a museum the female rats were pregnant with only one baby, so it is assumed that the rat gives birth to only one offspring at a time. The Alpine woolly rat mainly eats plants, seeds and various small animals.
Alpine woolly rat is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Alpine woolly rat, Wikidata item Q1769260. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
