A monster rat that can chew through coconuts has been caught on camera in what’s thought to be the first picture of the rodent.
The Vangunu giant rat (aka Uromys vika) first grabbed the attention of researchers when a dead one was found by loggers felling a tree on the Solomon Islands in 2017.
Since then, scientists have been trying to secure pictures of the huge animal – which can grow up to 1.5ft-long – and it seems they’ve finally got lucky, grabbing snaps of four of them.
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The rats, which have very long tails but short ears, are twice the size of the rodents we’re used to, and the ones caught on camera have been “irrefutably identified” as Vangunu giant rats, according to a study published in Ecology and Evolution.
Indigenous people living on Vangunu, one of the Solomon Islands, have known about the rats for a long time, but scientists have been unable to get evidence of them.
Researchers were given help by the members of the Zaira community, and they set up camera traps and lured the animals in with sesame oil. Tyrone Lavery, who led the study, said: “Capturing images of the Vangunu giant rat for the first time is extremely positive news for this poorly known species.”
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He added that they faced extinction because of logging, as last year the Solomon Islands’ government gave consent for commercial logging of the last bits of forest where the extremely rare rats live.
“If [logging] proceeds, it will undoubtedly lead to extinction of the Vangunu giant rat,” Tyrone said. “We hope that these images of Uromys vika will support efforts to prevent the extinction of this threatened species.”
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