Malagasy Giant Jumping Rat
It’s Rodent Week: The largest rodent in Madagascar, the Malagasy giant jumping rat might be mistaken for a rabbit, hopping around the dry tropical forest floor on its hind legs and living in burrows underground. But like so many of this island nation’s unique, endemic creatures, the giant jumping rat, or Votsovotsa, is threatened. The rat is described as endangered on the IUCN Red List, and its remaining habitat along the island’s west coast has been split into two dwindling and isolated patches by deforestation and development. Its total range now covers a mere 77 square miles, and a related species went extinct several thousand years ago. The population has been driven to historic lows, probably below 8,000, by feral dogs, and a recent study predicted that the species would be extinct in the wild within 24 years unless measures were taken to stop it.
In 1990, however, Gerald Durrell began a captive-breeding program with five individuals. The giant jumping rats are monogamous, staying with their mates for life, or until a mate is lost to a predator, often a fossa (a cat-like member of the civet family, also endemic to Madagascar) or a Madagascar ground boa: The rats routinely block up the entrances to their burrows with dirt and leaves to discourage entrance by snakes or other predators. In captivity, however, they have done well. In addition to the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, there are now a dozen institutions with successful captive-breeding programs. An excellent place to see the species in Madagascar is Kirindy, a protected area and research center on the western coast. For more on this distinctive rat, see “The Giant Jumping Rat, Another Peculiarity from Madagascar,” by Rhett Butler of Mongabay.
Photo: Piotr Lukasik, WildMadagascar.org
TODAY’S ENDANGERED ALL-STAR: Darwin’s Comet Orchid is only one of many endangered plants and animals on the island of Madagascar, which contains a fabulously rich trove of endemic species. While never having been to the island, Darwin predicted that the Comet Orchid must attract a pollinator with a foot-long tongue, since the flower sported a nectar-tube of that length. Some years later, a hawkmoth was discovered that fit the bill, now known as the “Predicta moth.”
Madagascar’s orchids are protected under CITES, but the nation’s current political leaders are pursuing a devastating policy, sanctioning the logging of rosewood forests, which threatens the destruction of much biodiversity—from lemurs to rare plants—and lucrative ecotourism centered around the island’s extraordinary parks. A University of Connecticut graduate student, Kathryn Theiss, chosen as one of the Switzer Environmental Fellows of 2009, has been studying Darwin’s orchid. She found that, since the riots and political upheaval of 2009, timber sales have accelerated and wild populations of Darwin’s orchid and another of her subjects, Erasanthe henrici, identified by Kew Research Gardens as one of the rarest orchids in the world, have disappeared. Learn more at www.wildmadagascar.org, and help these species by supporting programs run by Conservation International, WWF-Madagascar, and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.
