Microtus miurus Osgood 1901

Microtus miurus Osgood 1901, N. Amer. Fauna, 21: 64.

Type Locality: USA, Alaska, Cook Inlet, Turnagain Arm, head of Bear Creek in mountains near Hope City.

Vernacular Names: Singing Vole.

Synonyms: Microtus andersoni Rand 1945; Microtus cantator Anderson 1947; Microtus muriei Nelson 1931; Microtus oreas Osgood 1907; Microtus paneaki Rausch 1950 .

Distribution: Alaska, USA, except the central portion and Alaska Peninsula; eastwards through much of Yukon Territory to westernmost Northwest Territories and extreme NW British Columbia, Canada.

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc).

Discussion: Subgenus indeterminate. Classically treated as a member of the subgenus Stenocranius (e.g., Hall, 1981; Miller and Kellogg, 1955), an association that purported close affinity to Old World M. gregalis (see that account); synonymized with same to form a Holarctic species by Rausch (1964) and Rausch and Rausch (1968). Other data convincingly argue their specific distinctiveness and distant kinship (Anderson, 1960; Fedyk, 1970; Gromov and Polyakov, 1977; Vorontsov and Lyapunova, 1986), and phylogenetic studies of chromosomes (Zagorodnyuk, 1990) and mitochondrial DNA sequences (Conroy and Cook, 2000 a) require the removal of M. miurus (along with M. abbreviatus) from Stenocranius proper. Zagorodnyuk (1990) had emphasized this divergence by placing M. miurus in the subgenus Alexandromys, M. middendorfii species group, along with M. mongolicus and M. sachalinensis . According to the results of Conroy and Cook (2000 a), M. miurus, and its sister species M. abbreviatus, originated early within the radiation of North American Microtus, apart from Palearctic species.