Population sizes of four small mammals, Peromyscus leucopus, Microtus pennsylvanicus, Blarina brevicauda, and Sorex cinereus, were monitored for over twenty years at the UWM Field Station. F\ leucopus had moderate fluctuations in size, but showed no evidence of cyclic or regular fluctuations. M. pennsylvanicus exhibited dramatic fluctuations with cycles of 3-5 years. Neither shrew species appea...

PURPOSE Muscarinic receptors are known to regulate several important physiologic processes in the eye. Antagonists to these receptors such as atropine and pirenzepine are effective at stopping the excessive ocular growth that results in myopia. However, their site of action is unknown. This study details ocular muscarinic subtype expression within a well documented model of eye growth and inves...

For decades, ecologists have debated the importance of biotic interactions (e.g., competition) and abiotic factors in regulating populations. Competition can influence patterns of distribution, abundance, and resource use in many systems but remains difficult to measure. We quantified competition between two sympatric small mammals, Keen's mice (Peromyscus keeni) and dusky shrews (Sorex montico...

ruses co-evolved with their animal hosts, such as SEOV with rats and HTNV with striped mice, but when their animal hosts expanded their territory, hantavirus had more chance to infect other susceptible rodents and expanded their animal hosts. Both Asian house shrews and house mice are closely associated with humans by living inside and outside of human houses in China. The Asian house shrew and...

Many studies have indicated that the expression of interleukin-21 (IL-21) is associated with the pathogenesis of certain liver diseases. However, in alternative animal models of liver diseases, it remains unknown whether the tree shrew could be utilized to analyze the relationship between IL-21 and liver diseases. Here, the phylogenetic tree, sequence alignment and protein structure model of tr...

The Nicobar Shrew Crocidura nicobarica (Miller, 1902) is an endemic and ‘Critically Endangered’ species restricted to Great Island in the Andaman Sea, India. Predation instance on by a Cattle Egret reported herewith for first time littoral forests near Govind Nagar, Island.

Whereas visuomotor behaviors and visual object recognition have been studied in detail, we know relatively little about tactile object representations. We investigate a new model system for the tactile guidance of behavior, namely prey (cricket) capture by one of the smallest mammals, the Etruscan shrew, Suncus etruscus. Because of their high metabolic rate and nocturnal lifestyle, Etruscan shr...

Leptospirosis is an acute, febrile disease occurring in humans and animals worldwide. Leptospira spp. are usually transmitted through direct or indirect contact with the urine of infected reservoir animals. Among wildlife species, rodents act as the most important reservoir for both human and animal infection. To gain a better understanding of the occurrence and distribution of pathogenic lepto...

Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) was first recognized in far eastern Asia in the 1930s, and has been highly prevalent in this region ever since. To reveal the molecular epidemiology of hantaviruses in this region, a total of 374 small mammals (eight species of rodents and one species of shrew) were captured in the Chinese part of the Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island (Heilongjiang Province)...

To serve as an initial step in developing an ideal genetic marker map for the house musk shrew, Suncus murinus, 318 comparative anchor tagged sequence (CATS) primer pairs were assessed for polymorphism ascertainment and linkage mapping. Of the 112 (35.2%) CATS primer pairs that were successfully amplified by PCR in the shrew, 18 (16.1%) showed polymorphism between two mutant strains, BAN-kc, oe...