Allegheny wood rats

[Dylan8i]

These are pictures of another project i'm helping my advisor out with. These are allegheny wood rats, and are threatened in PA. They live in caves and rocky areas, so we trap them, and then ear tag them, take a genetic sample (ear punch) and a few other measurements then let them go (a few get radio collars).

these are all full frame with no pp work.










and then two others i took while out in the field.




last one was a new species for me, Plethodon wehrli

[paulnj]

Cool images of nasty rats

[Loupey]

They certainly have an unusual facial structure.

Radio collars? How small are those getting now? These rats must be somewhat small. Just curious.

[Dylan8i]

the rats are the same size as norway rats.... the adults are hard to restrain in one hand, but still pretty tiny.

heres a picture of one with a radio collar on. the hard part about collaring these guys is they squeeze in to so many places its hard to get the collars to stay on, with out being to tight... we have already had some fall off.

edit you can't actually see the radio transmitter because its on the underside, but its just a small square on that collar (collar is a zip tie with rubber tube around it)