Poponejo

Appearance

Unlike the brown hare, the male European rabbit is more heavily built than the female. The fur of the European rabbit is made up of soft down hair covered by stiff guard hairs, and is generally greyish-brown, though this is subject to much variation. The guard hairs are banded brown and black, or grey, while the nape of the neck and scrotum are reddish.

Adult European rabbits typically range from 36 to 38 centimetres (14 to 15 inches) in length and weigh 1.5 to 3 kilograms (3.3 to 6.6 pounds).

Range and habitat

The European rabbit's ideal habitat consists of short grasslands with secure refuge (such as burrows, boulders, hedgerows, scrub, and woodland) near feeding areas. In large coniferous plantations, the species only occurs on peripheral areas and along fire breaks and rides. In the rabbit's native range, it is strongly associated with Mediterranean shrubland.

It has been introduced to at least 800 islands and every continent except Antarctica, often with devastating effects on local biodiversity due to a lack of predators. Hundreds of thousands of European rabbits have been released in Spain and France as part of reintroduction efforts, though these were not particularly successful in increasing rabbit populations.

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

Breeding

Breeding groups of rabbits may extend to include two or more nearby warrens if beneficial to the population. The size of the species' home range varies according to habitat, food, shelter, cover from predators, and breeding sites, though it is generally small, encompassing about 4 ha (9.9 acres).

In the European rabbit's mating system, dominant bucks exhibit polygyny, whereas lower-status individuals (both bucks and does) often form monogamous breeding relationships. Monogamous relationships are also common among groups of rabbits with lower density of females. Even though male European rabbits may sometimes be amicable with one another, fierce fights can erupt among bucks during the breeding season, that typically starts in autumn and continues through to spring. Unlike hares, rabbits are born blind and helpless, requiring maternal care until they leave the nest.

In crisis

Even so, the species is listed as near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as it has faced population decline in its native range due to overhunting, habitat destruction, and diseases such as myxomatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic disease. This decline has directly led to negative impacts on populations of the Iberian lynx and Spanish imperial eagle, predators that rely on the rabbit as food. Even though the European rabbit thrives in many of the locations where it was introduced, within its native range in Iberia, populations are dwindling.

In 2018, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reclassified O. Cuniculus in Spain, Portugal, and France as "endangered", due to the extent of recent declines. The IUCN assessment of the species considers only those populations within its natural distribution, and as such it was considered endangered in their 2019 evaluation.

Poponejo 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 Poponejo, Wikidata item Q25851. 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.