Arvicola amphibius persicus De Filippi, 1865

Kryštufek, Boris, Koren, Toni, Engelberger, Simon, Horváth, Győző F., Purger, Jenő J., Arslan, Atilla, Chişamera, Gabriel & Murariu, Dumitru, 2015, Fossorial morphotype does not make a species in water voles, Mammalia (Warsaw, Poland) 79 (3), pp. 293-303 : 301

Arvicola amphibius persicus De Filippi, 1865

Type locality: Sultanieh , south of Elbruz Mountains, Persia (= Iran) .

Notes: Contains large, orthodont, and strictly aquatic water voles ( Kryštufek and Vohralík 2005) with 36 chromosomes (Arslan et al. 2013). This is the oldest name for water voles from the Middle East and is applicable to our samples from Anatolia (pts. 25 and 26 on Figure 1 ). Taxonomic scope is not resolved unambiguously but persicus probably contains as junior synonyms Microtus terrestris armenius Thomas, 1907 (Type locality: Van, 5000 ft., Eastern Asia Minor) and Arvicola terrestris hintoni Aharoni, 1932 (Type locality: Island of Tel el Sultan, Antioch Lake, Northern Syria) ( Ellerman and Morrison-Scott 1951, Ognev 1964, Kryštufek and Vohralík 2005).

Figures

Figure 1 Distribution of water vole samples sequenced for cytochrome b gene. Approximate ranges of ArVicola amphibiUS S.S. and A. Scherman follow Batsaikhan et al. (2008) and Amori et al. (2008a), respectively. Symbols for morphotypes (∆ – fossorial; □ – aquatic) correspond to those in Figure 4 and Table 1. Samples of unknown morphotype are denoted by circles.