Species
Arvicanthis niloticus "C1"
Description
Arvicanthis niloticus (É. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1803)
This species has been reported as A. dembeensis in previous studies (Yalden et al. 1976, 1996). It corresponds to A. niloticus clade C1 in Dobigny et al. (2013), but it seems to be a valid species, genetically very distinct from (and not sister to) A. niloticus “C2- C4” (sensu Dobigny et al. 2013) at both mitochondrial and nuclear markers (Bryja et al. 2019). The samples from Egypt (i.e. type locality of A. niloticus) belong to the mitochondrial clade C1 and the name “niloticus” should be therefore used for the species distributed along the Nile River, in northern Ethiopia and Yemen. On the other hand, the widely distributed species in the belt of Sudanian savanna from Senegal to southern Ethiopia and western Kenya (genetically structured from west to east) should receive another name; here we follow Bryja et al. (2019) by using provisionally the name A. niloticus “C2-C4” (see below). Recent genetic results therefore support previous views, e.g. based on skull morphology (Fadda & Corti 2001), that populations living along the Nile valley, in northern Ethiopia and Yemen represent the same species (see also taxonomic discussion in Musser & Carleton 2005), distinct from the Sudano-Sahelian taxon, i.e. A. niloticus “C2-C4”. There are two mitochondrial lineages of A. niloticus in Ethiopia. The first one was found around Lake Tana and Alatish NP and it also occurs along the Nile Valley in Sudan (Abdel Rahman et al. 2008), while the second is distributed in the Tigray Region and along the eastern escarpment of the Abyssinian massif (Bryja et al. 2019).
Taxonomy
Arvicanthis niloticus "C1" is a species. It belogs to the Muridae family.
