Ochotona curzoniae (Hodgson, 1858)

Robert S. Hoffmann, 1993, Order Lagomorpha, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 807-827 : 808

Ochotona curzoniae (Hodgson, 1858) . J. Asiat. Soc. Bengal, 1857, 26:207 [1858].

TYPE LOCALITY: "district of Chumbi", Chumbi Valley, Tibet, China .

DISTRIBUTION: Tibetan Plateau; adjacent Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan ( China), Sikkim ( India) and E Nepal.

STATUS: This species is the focus of widespread control efforts throughout its range, and has been eliminated locally (A. T. Smith et al., 1990).

SYNONYMS: melanostoma ( Büchner, 1890) .

COMMENTS: Includes melanostoma , but not seiana from Iran, contra Corbet (1978c:69); see A. T. Smith et al. (1990). Treated as a subspecies of dauurica by Mitchell (1978), but it is considered a distinct species by the Chinese; see Feng and Zheng (1985) and Feng et al. (1986). O. curzoniae and O. dauurica occur in geographic sympatry in Hainan County, Qinghai Province, China, and differ both chromosomally ( Vorontsov and Ivanitskaya, 1973) and electrophoretically ( Zhou and Xia, 1981).