It can stay under for as long as 20 minutes by cutting blood flow to non-essential organs while it dives.
From Common Muskrat
It digs burrows into the banks and swims well; it is in decline as riverside habitat is lost.
From Southern Water Vole
It is endemic to the Iberian Peninsula and France and is in sharp decline throughout its range: it is one of the Spanish mammals whose position has worsened fastest in recent decades, and yet it goes almost unnoticed.
From Southern Water Vole
Its disappearance has been linked directly to the spread of the American mink escaped from fur farms, which preys on it efficiently along stretches where it used to be abundant.
From Southern Water Vole
Its breeding cycle is among the fastest of any mammal: a female can give birth every month from two months of age, and its populations increase tenfold in a single favourable season.
From Hispid Cotton Rat
It is an important laboratory model in research on human respiratory viruses, because it responds to some of them more like people do than mice do.
From Hispid Cotton Rat
It is trained to detect landmines by the smell of the explosive: it weighs too little to set them off and can sweep in twenty minutes an area that would take a human with a detector four days. Thousands of mines have been located this way in Mozambique, Angola and Cambodia.
From Northern Giant Pouched Rat
It is also trained to detect tuberculosis in sputum samples: in an hour it screens as many samples as a laboratory does in several days, and it has made it possible to identify thousands of cases that microscopes had missed.
From Northern Giant Pouched Rat

Ecosystems

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