Mogera wogura (Temminck 1842)

[Talpa] wogura Temminck 1842, in: Siebold, Fauna Japonica, 1 (Mamm.), 1: 19.

Type Locality: Japan; restricted to Yokohama, Honshu by Thomas (1905 b), but believed to have come from W or S Kyushu by Abe (1995) .

Vernacular Names: Japanese Mole.

Subspecies::

Subspecies Mogera wogura subsp. wogura Temminck 1842

Subspecies Mogera wogura subsp. robusta Nehring 1891

Distribution: Japan (Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, Senkaku, Tane, Amakusa, Tsushima and other Isls), Korea to NE China and adjacent Siberia (Abe, 1995, 1996).

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc) as M. wogura, M. kobeau, and M. robusta .

Discussion: For a taxonomic discussion see Corbet (1978 c), who treated robusta as a different species. European authors often included kobeae and tokudae; however, Japanese authors (Imaizumi 1970 b; Yoshiyuki 1988 b) treated them as separate species. Formerly included in Talpa; but see Imaizumi (1970 b), Gureev (1979), and Gromov and Baranova (1981). The present arrangement follows Abe (1995). However, moles from Japan have a different karyotype (2n = 36, FN = 52) than moles from the Korean mainland (2n = 36, FN = 58) (Kawada et al., 2001). Mitochondrial cytochrome b gene sequences studied by Tsuchiya et al. (2000) revealed three clades in Japan (Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu) and two distinct clades on the mainland of Korea and E Russia.