Locomotion and postures of the Vietnamese pygmy dormouse Typhlomys chapensis (Platacanthomyidae, Rodentia): climbing and
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Locomotion and postures of the Vietnamese pygmy dormouse Typhlomys chapensis (Platacanthomyidae, Rodentia): climbing and leaping in the blind Dionisios Youlatos1 · Aleksandra A. Panyutina2 · Makrina Tsinoglou1 · Ilya A. Volodin3 Received: 2 January 2020 / Accepted: 29 May 2020 © Deutsche Gesellschaft für Säugetierkunde 2020
Abstract The Vietnamese pygmy dormouse is a small, arboreal, nocturnal, blind rodent that uses incipient echolocation to navigate in tree canopies. In order to assess its arboreal faculties in relation to echolocative capacity, the present study investigated the locomotor and postural behavior of the species in a simulated arboreal environment within an enclosure. The study subjects were intensively video and audio recorded and the two sets of data were synchronized for subsequent analyses. This is the first study on the positional behavior and substrate use of the Vietnamese pygmy dormice. Our results showed that the species spent most of its time on arboreal substrates, mostly traveling and scanning. Locomotion was dominated by vertical climb and leap, occurring mostly on small vertical and on medium and large strongly inclined substrates, respectively. Locomotion and substrate type were strongly related to emission of echolocative pulses. These findings most likely suggest that echolocation compensates for poor vision to effectively negotiate highly challenging arboreal constraints, and are in favor of the arboreal origins of pygmy dormice. Moreover, such a scenario could also support the echolocation-first hypothesis for the emergence of echolocation in bats prior to active flight. Keywords Locomotion · Postures · Echolocation · Arboreal · Non-visual orientation
Introduction The enigmatic rodent family Platacanthomyidae is the earliest phylogenetic offshoot of the Muroidea and includes two morphologically unique genera distributed in the highlands of South and Southeast Asia (Musser and Carleton 2005; Lv et al. 2006; Jansa et al. 2009): the monotypic Malabar spiny dormouse Platacanthomys, restricted to the mountains of south-western India, and the pygmy dormouse Typhlomys, confined to the highlands of southern China and northern Vietnam (Wilson and Reeder 2005). Recent research has Handling editor: Daisuke Koyabu. * Dionisios Youlatos [email protected] 1
Department of Zoology, School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
2
Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
3
Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
shown that the genus Typhlomys includes four species: Typhlomys cinereus, T. daloushanensis, and T. nanus are endemic to China, while T. chapensis is found in southern China and northern Vietnam (Wu and Wang, 1984; Wang et al. 1996; Cong et al. 2013; Abramov et al. 2014; Cheng et al. 2017). The Chapa or Vietnamese pygmy dormouse Typhlomys chapensis Osgood, 1932 is a nocturnal small rodent (body mass about 10–20
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