Short-tailed chinchilla

Appearance

The fur is very soft and plush due to the high number of hairs in a single follicle. 50 hairs can be held in a follicle, as compared to human hair that typically has one hair per follicle. Chinchilla fur is extremely valuable and is considered the softest in the world. Fur color can vary by individual, but colors range from violet, sapphire, blue-grey, beige, beige, brown, ebony, gray, white, cream, and pearl with each hair having a black tip.

The short-tailed chinchilla is generally smaller than the long-tailed chinchilla and can be distinguished by comparing general body length, head size, tail length, and ear. It has a tail measuring up to 130 mm (5.1 in).

Range and habitat

Short-tailed chinchillas primarily live in self-dug burrows or crevices of rocky areas with shrubs and grasses nearby, usually mountainous grasslands. Typically, their habitat has a sparse cover of thorny shrubs, cacti, and patches of succulents. Historically, short-tailed chinchillas lived in the Andes mountains and were native to Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

The diet for chinchillas is heavily plant-based, mainly grasses and shrubs found on the sides of mountains. Short-tailed chinchillas are herbivores and mainly feed on high-fiber vegetation specifically foliage, leaves, shrubs, seeds, nuts, grasses, herbs, flowers, and grains.

Sometimes, they will feed on insects as part of their diet. Even so, their diet changes with the season, depending on what is available, mainly the perennial Chilean needle-grass. Due to females being slightly larger than males, female chinchillas often dominate males and will mate twice a year.

In crisis

The short-tailed chinchilla is a small rodent part of the Chinchillidae family and is classified as an endangered species by the IUCN. The species remains extant in the Andes mountains of northern Chile, but small populations have been found in southern Bolivia. As the demand for chinchilla pelts rose, the species number declined, leading to the species' apparent extinction in 1917.

Despite the species' rediscovery in the wild in 1953, the population of short-tailed chinchillas has continued to decline and has been categorized as endangered. Numerous threats to short-tailed chinchillas exist, among them illegal hunting, habitat loss, firewood harvesting, and mining.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Short-tailed chinchilla 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 Short-tailed chinchilla, Wikidata item Q666850. 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.