Morro Bay Kangaroo Rat and its habitat
You may have heard of Kangaroo Rats before. In general, Kangaroo Rats are not
uncommon. There are 19 species of
Kangaroo Rats in North America, many of which only live in California. Actually, these little guys are more closely
related to squirrels than they are to rats. The federally endangered Morro Bay Kangaroo
Rat (Dipodomys Heermanni Morroensis) is the smallest and darkest of the nine subspecies
of Dipodomys Heermanni. It is also the
most isolated from any of the other subspecies of Heermanni; surviving on only
approximately 35 acres of sandy-soiled coastal dune and coastal sage scrub along
the western edge of San Luis Obispo County, California.
Geographic and Population Changes
The chart below, obtained from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Department’s
recovery plan, shows that populations of the Morro Bay Kangaroo Rat have been
declining since the first estimate, by Cal Poly student G.R. Stewart in 1958, of
8,000 individual rats. An estimate, in
1986, by former California Polytechnic State University Professor Roger Gambs
was only 50. As of the 1999 USFWD draft
recovery plan, sadly, it is believed that less than that amount are in
existence today.
Listing
Date and Type of Listing
Date listed: October 13, 1970 Type:
Endangered
Cause
of listing and Main threats to existence
The main threats to the Morro Bay Kangaroo Rat have historically been,
and continue to be, habitat loss due to residential development, predatory
domestic animals, and fragmentation of their native habitat. The sad part is that, due to the fact that
the limited amount of remaining habitat is likely insufficient to ever sustain
a stable population, the threat of endangerment will never allow our poor
little Morro Bay Kangaroo Rat to come off of the endangered species list.
The revised 1999 recovery plan calls for five main courses of action in
an attempt to restore Morro Bay Kangaroo Rat populations to an average of 4
animals per acre. This would allow the
species to be downgraded from ‘endangered’ to ‘threatened’.
The five areas that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Dept. 1999 draft
recovery plan calls for are:
1.)
Remove up to 100 Morro Bay kangaroo rats from the wild
and breed them in captivity, with a surrogate Lompoc kangaroo rat (Dipodomys
heermanni arenae), if necessary.
2.)
Interagency effort to secure, manage, and improve
habitat for all available areas in historic habitat.
3.)
Reintroduce Morro Bay kangaroo rats to the wild in
restored habitat.
4.)
Conduct public outreach and fundraising efforts.
5.)
Revise the Morro Bay kangaroo rat recovery plan
based on population viability changes.
Although relatively recent research has shown favorable evidence that the
MBKR may still persist in isolated colonies, one has not actually been seen in
the wild since 1986.
Sadly, it may already be too late for our little friend. I sure hope not!
VARIOUS INFO RECEIVED FROM
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