Apodemus chejuensis

Jo, Yeong-Seok, Kim, Tae-Wook, Choi, Byeong-Jin & Oh, Hong-Shik, 2012, Current status of terrestrial mammals on Jeju Island, Journal of Species Research 1 (2), pp. 249-256 : 253

Apodemus chejuensis , Jeju Striped Field Mouse

The striped field mouse was first reported on Jeju by Johnson and Jones (1955) to be a subspecies, A. a. chejuensis . According to Won and Smith (1999), the subspecies of striped field mouse on Jeju was regarded as separate species, A. chejuensis based on Koh and Yoo (1992). But Koh et al. (1998) treated A. chejuensis as a morphologically distinctive insular population of A. agrarius . Striped field mouse populations on both Jeju Island and nearby Wan Island (80 km North from Jeju) were regard- ed as A. a. chejuensis ( Koh et al., 1998) . However, based on recent research that compared external and cranial morphological characters, Oh et al. (2003) treats A. a. chejuensis as a separate species, Apodemus chejuensis . And Oh and Mori (1998) revealed reproductive isolation judging that a reproductive barrier existed between the two local populations because the reproduction success rate was very low in the crosses between the 2 subspecies or the first generation and parents through crossbreeding experiments to test reproductive compatibility between 2 subspecies, Apodemus agrarius coreae from the Korean mainland and Apodemus agrarius chejuensis from Jeju Island.

The striped field mouse is the most abundant rodent on Jeju and inhabits various habitats from grassland, hills, and shrub forest, to the top of Halla-san.