Talk:Muskrat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Family/Revert

Cricetidae is an invalid synonym for Muridae according to ITIS. NCBI gives Muridae. I reverted the change because I can't find anyone who shows Ondatra as Cricetidae, and Wikipedia calls the family Muridae. Is there support for this change? —Tkinias 10:54, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I just put together a Cricetidae page, which should explain most of it. Muridae as defined by NCBI and ITIS is based on Musser and Carleton's chapter in Wilson and Reeder's Mammal Species of the World 1993. They explained (Caleton and Musser in a 1984 publication) that they subsumed all subfamilies of muroids into a single family, Muridae, because there was no data to support how any of the previous authors divided the group into families. This was not done because it shouldn't be split into several families (1/4 of all mammals are in this superfamily), just that there was no way of knowing how the subfamilies are related to each other. Since 1993 there have been a series of genetic studies (i.e. Michaux et al. in Molecular Biology and Evolution 2001; Jansa and Weksler in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 2004; and Norris et al. in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 2004) on the group that have all shown essentially the same relationships. The best of these, Steppan et al. 2004, is referenced on the Muroidea page. They proposed the taxonomy shown there. -Aranae 05:48, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

(I moved Aranae's post to make the chronology clear...) OK, cool. I should have looked at who was doing the edit. Being unfamiliar with the literature, I thought this was reverting to an older classification (such as I've seen people do on some fish pages). Looks good. —Tkinias 18:13, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Muskrat Trapping

A Muskrat Trapping article was just created; but I think it would be better suited in here. Merge and redirect? --Andy Saunders 15:28, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

• MERGE - SirIsaacBrock 01:47, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
• Agreed. MERGE - fdewaele 16:05, 1 May 2006 (CET)
• MERGE Do it!
• DON'T MERGE, its ok to have more than 1 section for an animal.
• MERGE - The trapping article has to do with an aspect of the Muskrat's life. --Acromagalin 22:06, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Picture

How about a picture with color like out in it's surroundings. --Riverofdreams 15:58, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Would this one do? It's a little blurry, and you'd have to contact the copyright holder for permission, but looking at that site it seems possible that he'd give it. It says he took all the photos on that site himself. Also, if he could be convinced to generally consider putting images under the GFDL for Wikipedia on request, his page could be a very useful resource--it seems to have a lot of pictures of nature and such that would be valuable on Wikipedia. Anyway, you could check out the Boilerplate request for permission and send something like that to his email address if you want. Alternatively, this one is at this government site, so we might be able to use it... but I don't see any copyright notices, so you'd have to contact the address at the bottom of that second link to ask about copyright status first. A simple Google Image search for [muskrat] turns up 9,080 results; I'm sure if you dug around a little you could find one you could use under the GFDL, or whose copyright holder could be convinced to put it under the GFDL. Aquillion 02:47, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

• • Replaced line drawing with clear FWS color photo. Hope you like it. Muskrats don't seem to be too photogenic, but this one was. By the way, I sort of know the webmaster of the Eco-USA page you referenced. He's a fellow Hoosier. User:Cuppysfriend 1 September 2005.