Lemniscomys striatus (Linnaeus 1758)

[Mus] striatus Linnaeus 1758, Syst. Nat., 10th ed., Vol. 1: 62.

Type Locality: " India " (= Sierra Leone; see G. M. Allen, 1939:394).

Vernacular Names: Typical Lemniscomys.

Synonyms: Lemniscomys ardens (Thomas 1910); Lemniscomys dieterleni Van der Straeten 1976; Lemniscomys fasciatus (Wroughton 1906); Lemniscomys luluae Matschie 1926; Lemniscomys lynesi Thomas and Hinton 1923; Lemniscomys massaicus (Pagenstecher 1885); Lemniscomys micropus (Heller 1911); Lemniscomys orientalis (Desmarest 1819); Lemniscomys pulchella (Gray 1864); Lemniscomys pulcher (Wroughton 1906); Lemniscomys venustus (Thomas 1911); Lemniscomys versustus (Thomas 1911); Lemniscomys wroughtoni (Thomas 1910) .

Distribution: From Guinea (Ziegler et al., 2002), Sierra Leone and Ghana (Grubb et al., 1998), and Burkina Faso west to Ethiopia (Yalden et al, 1996), and south into N Angola (Crawford-Cabral, 1998) and through Kenya (Hollister, 1919), Uganda (Delany, 1975), Rwanda, E Dem. Rep. Congo, and Tanzania (Swynnerton and Hayman, 1951; Grimshaw et al., 1995, reviewed Mt Kilimanjaro records) into NE Zambia (Ansell, 1978) and N Malawi (Ansell and Dowsett, 1988).

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc).

Discussion: Reviewed by Van der Straeten and Verheyen (1980). Carleton and Van der Straeten (1997) discussed and identified the holotype of Linnaeus’s Mus striatus . Chromosomal information reported by Matthey (1959), Van der Straeten (1977 b), and Van der Straeten and Verheyen (1979 a). Van der Straeten (1976 a) described dieterleni as a distinctive subspecies of L. striatus occurring in the Lake Kivu region of E Dem. Rep. Congo. He (1981) also documented the identity of venustus as representing a population of L. striatus . Morphology of palatal ridges and karyotypes contrasted with L. mittendorfi by Fülling (1992); see account of L. mittendorfi . Ecological and other data for populations from S Ghana reported by Ryan and Attuquayefio (2000) and Decher and Bahian (1999). Hutterer et al. (1992 a) noted that L. striatus is common in Nigeria and Cameroon. Kerbis Peterhans et al. (1998) reviewed altitudinal distribution on Ugandan slopes of Ruwenzori Mtns. Isolated teeth from Pleistocene deposits in East Africa have been identified as L. aff. striatus (Wesselman, 1984) .