Ondatra zibethicus (Linnaeus, 1766)

Guy G. Musser & Michael D. Carleton, 1993, Order Rodentia - Family Muridae, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 501-755 : 532

Ondatra zibethicus (Linnaeus, 1766) . Syst. Nat., 12th ed., 1:79.

TYPE LOCALITY: E Canada .

DISTRIBUTION: North America, north to the treeline, including Newfoundland; south to the Gulf of Mexico, Rio Grande and lower Colorado River valleys. Introduced to Czechoslovakia in 1905 and now widespread in the Palearctic, including C and N Europe, most of Ukraine, Russia, and Siberia, adjacent parts of China and Mongolia, and Honshu Isl, Japan (see Corbet, 1978c); also into southernmost Argentina (see Olrog and Lucero, 1981).

SYNONYMS: albus, americana , aquilonius, bernardi, cinnamominus, goldmani , hudsonius , macrodon , maculosa , mergens, niger , nigra , obscurus , occipitalis , osoyoosensis , pallidus , ripensis, rivalicius, spatulatus , varius , zalophus.

COMMENTS: Revised, under the name Fiber , by Hollister (1911). Comprehensive summaries of ecology, population biology, and economic status provided by Pietsch (1982) and Perry (1982); history of introductions, mostly for fur-farms, and population spread in Eurasia and USA reviewed by Storer (1937). See Willner et al. (1980, Mammalian Species, 141).