Rattus colletti (Thomas, 1904)

Guy G. Musser & Michael D. Carleton, 1993, Order Rodentia - Family Muridae, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 501-755 : 651

Rattus colletti (Thomas, 1904) . Novit. Zool., 11:599.

TYPE LOCALITY: Australia, Northern Territory, South Alligator River .

DISTRIBUTION: Australia; known only from the coastal floodplains of the Northern Territory, the most restricted range of all the native Australian Rattus . (see map in Watts and Aslin, 1981).

COMMENTS: Arranged as a subspecies of R. sordidus by Taylor and Horner (1973), but subsequently treated as a separate species ( Mahoney and Richardson, 1988; Watts and Aslin, 1981). Although diploid counts are very different, Rattus colletti (2N=42) is genically close to R. villosissimus (2N=50); the two hybridize in the laboratory, but the offspring exhibit severely reduced fertility ( Baverstock et al., 1983a, 1986). Fertile hybrids have been obtained between laboratory crosses of R. colletti and R. tunneyi , but the two are sympatric in the wild where no hybrids have been found ( Baverstock et al., 1983a).