New Mammal Species 2014

Waiomys mamasae

New species of animal are discovered every day. That isn't hyperbole; I mean it literally. I'm not sure of the exact number of new species that were named last year, but it's in the thousands, and likely a five-figure number, at that. This is, you'll note, rather a lot.

The great majority, of course, are insects. "An inordinate fondness for beetles" and all that. Most of the ones that aren't are also invertebrates, typically small things like mites, spiders, or crustaceans. When we do look at vertebrates, most of the new ones are fish, with amphibians and reptiles not far behind. For instance, looking at the new species described in the daily journal Zootaxa (by no means the only source for such things, although it is one of the largest) on Friday 12th December 2014, I count seven beetles, two flies, three crickets, a frog, a salamander, a gecko, and (unusually) a bunting.

In fact, new birds are, if anything, even more rarely described than new mammals. But while while new mammal species are not discovered that often, there are still several each year. So, for this, the last post of 2014, why not look back at some of the mammals that were officially described for the first time this year? This will not be, by any means, a comprehensive survey, just a sampling, and I'm not even counting the various new fossils that have been described, but nonetheless, here we go:

Struggle of the Marsh Antelopes

Puku

All things being equal, herbivores would prefer to live in those areas with the best and most lush vegetation. The reality, of course, is that all things are very rarely equal. There are all sorts of reasons why a herbivore might not wish to live somewhere where they can get the best quality food.

One of those reasons is the presence of predators. If predators also live where the vegetation happens to be best, a herbivore has to strike a balance between the quality of the food and the risk of getting eaten. But a herbivore also has to worry about... other herbivores.

If you eat exactly the same thing as some other animal, and try to do so in the same place, whichever one of you is even marginally better at it is going to, over a sufficiently long period of time, out-compete the other one and drive it to at least local extinction. We see this, for example, in England, where grey squirrels introduced from North America have out-competed the red squirrels native to the island. There are only a few places left in England where you can still see red squirrels, but the foreign grey squirrels are quite common.