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MammalingSpecies accountsRodents › Cricetidae

El Carrizo Deermouse

Peromyscus ochraventer
EN · Endangered Rodentia Cricetidae
El Carrizo Deermouse (Peromyscus ochraventer)
Photo: © Juan Cruzado Cortés, some rights reserved (CC BY)
Size
8-10 cm + tail 9-11 cm
Weight
20 to 30 g
Activity
Nocturnal
Sociability
Solitary

Description

It has the belly tinted of a very characteristic yellow ocre tone, different from the pure white presented by most of its forest relatives, a detail that gives it a name and helps to differentiate it in hand. It lives in the cloudy forest and tropical mountain forest of a fringe in northeast Mexico, in the boundary between the states of San Luis Potosí and Tamaulipas, a climate transition area that houses a remarkable diversity of small mammals. Like the rest of mice of its genre, it is an opportunistic nocturnal forage that adapts to the availability of seasonal seed, fruit and invertebrate of the sotobosque.

How to identify it

Small rodent, gray brown coat on the back and belly of a characteristic yellow ocre tone, different from the pure white of other related species. It differs from other species of Peromyscus of northeast Mexico precisely by that ocre tone of the belly, a visible trait even at a glance in hand.

Signs and tracks

Small footprint, 1.3-1.8 cm, with 4 front fingers and 5 rear fingers. Small, lengthy excrete, 3-5 mm, left scattered by paths between the vegetation of the mountain sotobosque. Excavate dirty strawberries under roots, dropped trunks or rocks, with the semi-cultured entrance between the dense vegetation of the mist forest where you live.

Habitat and range

A medium-mountain rainforest and rainforest, with dense sotobosque, generally between 800 and 2000 m of altitude.Distributed by a region of northeast Mexico, on the border between San Luis Potosí and Tamaulipas.

Diet

Omnivorous, it feeds on seed, fruit, fungus and invertebrates from the mountain subsoil where it lives.

Behaviour

Solitary and nightlife, with a campsite centered on the dense sotobosque of the mountain forest where it lives.

Conservation

Its populations are considered to be declining due to the continued loss of the fog forest it depends on, transformed increasingly by the agricultural and livestock expansion in northeastern Mexico.

Threats

Deforestation and fragmentation of the fog and tropical mountain forest by agricultural and livestock expansion in San Luis Potosí and Tamaulipas.

Other accounts in Cricetidae

See all species accounts for rodents · Full species index

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