Northern mole vole
Ellobius talpinus
— Where the name comes from
Ellobius comes from the Greek ellóbion, “earring”, from en and lobós: it alludes to an ear reduced to a simple hole, as in all animals that spend their lives in tunnels. Talpinus is “mole-like”, and is to be read as resemblance, not kinship — this is a rodent, and the mole is an insectivore. Two unrelated animals that, by digging, became identical.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Rodents
- Habitat
- Steppe, grassland, deep clay soils
- Range
- From southern Ukraine to Kazakhstan and western China
- Size
- 10–13 cm, tail almost absent, 40–70 g
- Diet
- Roots, bulbs, tubers
- Lifespan
- 3 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It digs with its incisors, not its feet, and keeps its lips closed behind the teeth.
- 02
The eyes are reduced to dots beneath the skin: it barely tells light from dark.
- 03
It lives in family groups sharing a tunnel system tens of metres long.
— What sets it apart
It has thrown away the Y chromosome. In this species both males and females have two X chromosomes, and the Sry gene that in mammals switches on male development has vanished entirely: sex is determined by something else, which nobody has yet identified with certainty. It is one of the very few mammals in the world to have dismantled a genetic system taken to be universal, and geneticists study it to understand what would happen if the human Y chromosome, which has been shrinking for millions of years, one day ran out.
