Critically Endangered
European mink
Mustela lutreola
European mink is a carnivore in the family Mustelidae (order Carnivora) — Mustela lutreola, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
It is similar in colour to the American mink, but is slightly smaller and has a less specialized skull.
Range and habitat
Its range was widespread in the 19th century, with a distribution extending from northern Spain in the west to the river Ob (just east of the Urals) in the east, and from the Archangelsk region in the north to the northern Caucasus in the south. Over the last 150 years, though, it has severely declined by more than 90% and been extirpated or greatly reduced over most of its former range. The current range includes an isolated population in northern Spain and western France, that is widely disjunct from the main range in Eastern Europe (Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, central regions of European Russia, the Danube Delta in Romania and northwestern Bulgaria).
European mink reintroduction project, ex-situ, in-situ research with Dr.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The construction of the burrow is not complex, often consisting of one or two passages 8–10 cm (3.1–3.9 in) in diameter and 1.40–1.50 m (1.53–1.64 yd) in length, leading to a nest chamber measuring 48 cm × 55 cm (19 in × 22 in). The European mink has a diverse diet consisting largely of aquatic and riparian fauna.
Differences between its diet and that of the American mink are small. The lactation period lasts 2.0 to 2.5 months, though the kits eat solid food after 20–25 days.
In crisis
The European mink is listed by the IUCN as Critically Endangered due to an ongoing reduction in numbers, having been calculated as declining more than 50% over the past three generations and expected to decline at a rate exceeding 80% over the next three generations. European mink numbers began to shrink during the 19th century, with the species rapidly becoming extinct in some parts of Central Europe. During the 20th century, mink numbers declined all throughout their range, the reasons for that having been hypothesised to be due to a combination of factors, among them climate change, competition with (as well as diseases spread by) the introduced American mink, habitat destruction, declines in crayfish numbers and hybridisation with the European polecat.
In Central Europe and Finland, the decline preceded the introduction of the American mink, having likely been due to the destruction of river ecosystems, while in Estonia, the decline seems to coincide with the spread of the American mink.
European mink is Critically 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 European mink, Wikidata item Q26559. 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.
