Uromys

Palaeoecology of Uromys

Living species of Uromys are semiarboreal omnivores (Breed & Ford, 2007). The ability to access food resources in the canopy (e.g., fruits, before they fall to the forest floor) has been suggested as a competitive advantage for species of Uromys (Rader & Krockenberger, 2006); this probably played a role in resource partitioning in the species-rich Mount Etna Middle Pleistocene rainforest. The larger size of most species (U. hadrourus and U. porculus being exceptions) allows them to utilize food resources that are inaccessible to smaller rodents. For example, large species of Uromys in north Queensland are known to gnaw through the hard, thick shells of coconuts (Watts & Aslin, 1981) and are also infamous for opening metal traps (Elliot traps) to steal bait or prey upon smaller mammals (Laurance et al., 1993; Eric Vanderduys, pers. comm. January 2020). Furthermore, there is evidence that smaller murines actively avoid large species of Uromys (Leung, 2008) suggesting that an “ecology of fear” (Brown et al., 1999) may have a role in structuring small mammal assemblages, at least on a local scale. Uromys aplini is the largest murine in the Mount Etna deposits, and may have behaved much like its extant relatives, robbing large seeds, consuming fruits and insects, and generally terrorizing the smaller vertebrates.