Erinaceus concolor Martin 1837

Erinaceus concolor Martin 1837, Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1837: 103.

Type Locality: Turkey, near Trabzon.

Vernacular Names: Southern White-Breasted Hedgehog.

Subspecies::

Subspecies Erinaceus concolor subsp. concolor Martin 1837

Subspecies Erinaceus concolor subsp. rhodius Festa 1914

Subspecies Erinaceus concolor subsp. transcaucasicus Satunin 1905

Distribution: Asia Minor to Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran; S Caucasus.

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc).

Discussion: Formerly included in europaeus; but see Kratochvíl (1975), Kral (1967), Orlov (1969), Suchentrunk et al. (1998), among others. Recently two genotypes have been discovered (Filippucci and Simson, 1996, Santucci et al., 1998, Seddon et al., 2002) that correspond to two morphotypes (Kryštufek, 2002 b; Kryštufek and Vohralik, 2001). As suggested by Filippucci and Simson (1996), we distinguish here a southern ( E. concolor) and a northern ( E. roumanicus) species. This step has also been taken by Bannikova et al. (2002). The map in Mitchell-Jones et al. (1999) refers mainly to E. roumanicus . The inclusion of rhodius follows a suggestion of B. Kryštufek (in litt., 2003) but still needs closer study.