The Arvicolinae Website

This page and related links are devoted to the study of arvicoline rodents (voles, lemmings, muskrats, etc.).

If you would like to add, comment, revise or somehow improve this site, please email me by clicking here.

History

Arvicolines are a subfamily within the rodent family Muridae. They share many morphological characters with other members of this diverse group. What sets them apart from most are their evergrowing, rootless molars, allowing them to eat grass. However, there are many exceptions to this rule. Some members of the Tribe Clethrionomyini have rooted molars, considered a primitive trait. A concise history of the group with references can be found at the Mammal Species of the World website here. The website encyclopedia.com has some nice, succinct descriptions of voles, lemmings, and muskrats. Thomas Linder in Austria has a nice website about true lemmings. James Reichel has a great bibliography of bog lemmings, compiled in 1996.

Popular Reading

Here is an amusing alternative history of voles on Earth at the Vole Appreciation Society site. A number of fiction books have been written that include voles, lemmings and muskrats either in the title or body. Here is a short list:

For young children:
The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat by Thornton Burgess
The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse by Thornton Burgess
The Vole Who Would Be King by Ginette Thomas and Susan Varley
The Sleepy Water Vole by Noel Barr
The Adventures of Uncle Vole by Vicki Brown
Brown Mouse and Vole by Vicki Artis
Vernon Vole's Great Giveaway by Wendy Wilkin
The Tale of Jeremy Vole by Stephen Lawhead

teenagers and adults:
Vale of the Vole by Piers Anthony
Planet of the Voles: A Science Fiction Novel by Charles Platt
Lone Muskrat by Glen Rounds
Vampire Voles by Garry Kilworth

Other uses of the term vole and lemming.

Vole has been used as an acronym for a variety of sites, including the Virtual Online Learning Education site. Vets On-Line Email is another. The American Philosophical Society library uses the term vole for their Vaughan On-line Catalog of Printed Materials. There are so many links on the web for lemmings I will leave it up to the reader to discover them on their own. Suffice it to say that a certain computer game and the legendary phenomenon of lemmings jumping over cliffs in the ocean have led to many silly uses of the term lemming.

Evolution, Population Biology and Genetics

The early evolution of arvicolines and their biogeography has been debated widely by paleontologists and in general by mammalogists, notably by Charles Repenning, Chris Bell, Jean Chaline, I.M. Gromov, I. Y. Polyakov, and Robert Hoffmann. Debate exists over the monophyletic or polyphyletic origin of the group, continent of origin, and the relationship between extinct fossil forms and extant forms. Some extinct forms (e.g. Mimomys, Allophaiomys) were widespread in Asia and at times in North America. However, rapid morphological evolution has made it difficult to trace the biogeographical history and descent of these forms.

Important formal treatments of arvicoline taxonomy were written by Gerrit Miller, Jr. (1896), Vernon Bailey (1900), and Martin A. C. Hinton (1926). These works really set the stage for most later works and few major revisions have followed. Most changes in the 20th century have led to lumping and few new taxa have been formally described.

In the mid to late 20th century, a number of seminal population studies were done that also led to much theoretical work on population regulation in arvicolines. Through these studies, they have become great study organisms for the phenomenon of population dynamics in mammals. Some important authors in this area are D. Chitty, Charles Krebs, William Z. Lidicker, Nils Stenseth, and Jerry Wolff.

In the last 30 years or so there have been a large number of studies of arvicolines from molecular perspectives. Chromosomal work by R. Matthey was followed by Karl Fredga, T. C. Tsu, Lawrence Johnson, W. Modi, Steven Judd, and S. Ohno. Voles and lemmings are highly polymorphic chromosomally and attempts have been made to reconstruct their phylogeny through patterns in their chromosome evolution. However, this has largely been found to be too complicated, possibly because of the rapidity of their evolution. Other work has been done on vole allozymes, mtDNA and more recently nuclear DNA. William Moore and Bill Kilpatrick did early work on vole population genetics with allozymes. W. Kelly Thomas and A. T. Beckenbach (1986), Yves Plante et al. (1989) and Pumo et al. (1992) are examples of early papers on the use of molecular data for phylogeography in voles. Vadim Fedorov has worked extensively on phylogeography of lemmings across the holarctic. Maarit Jaarola has worked on a secondary contact zone in voles in Scandinavia and is working on phylogeography and systematics of Eurasian voles. Håkan Tegelström has worked on mitochondrial DNA introgression in red-backed voles, Clethrionomys. Chris Conroy has worked on phylogeography and systematics of voles in North America. Recently, Masahiro Iwasa and colleagues have done a lot of work on voles, mostly Eothenomys in Japan. They have a website describing their vole network.

Management

Voles and lemmings are notorious as agricultural pests. Although they are generally not commensal, some crops and orchards are particularly susceptible to them. Thus, a variety of management agencies have created websites devoted to their control and hopeful eradication. Indeed, if you do random searches for voles on the www, mostly what you find are websites related to poisoning them. Muskrats in particular are a pest in agricultural settings, damaging waterways by burrowing into their sides to create homes. Here is a good site on the internet for information.

References

Here will be a list of references on the evolution and biology of voles and lemmings I have accumulated over the years. There is no goal to this list, other than to provide literature on arvicolines I have used in my research or I find interesting. There might also be some papers in here that have nothing to do with arvicolines, but are related to ways to study them. There is a bias on evolutionary literature. Feel free to email me other references you think are useful or interesting.