Кей-Ларго ағаш егесінің сирек түрі

Subspecies of rodent endemic to Key Largo, Florida, United States

The Key Largo woodrat (Neotoma floridana smalli), It is currently on the United States Fish and Wildlife Service list of endangered species. Only 6500 animals were thought to remain in North Key Largo in the late 1980s. In 1987, Lazell suggested that it is distinct enough to be considered a separate species, but this proposal has not been accepted. The mitochondrial DNA of Key Largo woodrats is distinct by at least 0.6% from that of the most similar subspecies, the Florida woodrat (N. f. floridana) from further north in Florida, but members of that subspecies differ about as much from each other as from the Key Largo woodrat.

Since the Key Largo woodrat has a small and specific habitat, it is susceptible to human encroachment. Since the 1920s, it has lost almost half of its traditional habitat. by the end of the 1980s, a study showed that the rat had disappeared from Key Largo proper and its total population had dwindled to some 6500 animals on North Key Largo. The project, which by 1982 included a planned 2806 units, ran into opposition from environmental groups and by 1984 had ground to a halt after one of the investors withdrew a $54 million investment. in 1983 already, the administration had intervened and declared the Key Largo woodrat and the Key Largo cotton mouse (Peromyscus gossypinus allapaticola) endangered on a "temporary emergency basis"; the developer of a golf course, for instance, was ordered to restore the area he was illegally developing, to preserve the woodrat's habitat. Since 1984, the Key Largo woodrat is on the United States list of endangered species, along with the Schaus swallowtail and the Key Largo cotton mouse. By the 1990s, the animal's habitat had shrunk to about three square miles, and the Key Largo woodrat was called "one of the rarest creatures on earth." The animal also suffers from competition with the invasive black rat (Rattus rattus). As of 2005, the Key Largo woodrat population was still struggling to survive among the half built condominiums of the former Port Bougainville project, which in 2003 became part of the Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park. of the developer's land were bought up by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1987; the Botanical State Park now takes up the rat finds refuge in the Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge, which has a captive breeding program currently in operation but increasing development continues to threaten the animal.

The threat to many threatened species, but especially the woodrat and the cotton mouse generated broad interest in the Florida Keys in the 1980s, with many environmental groups being formed. Anna Dagny Johnson (1918–2003), a well known environmentalist, led efforts by the Upper Keys Citizens Association, Friends of the Everglades, and the Izaak Walton League to stop development around North Key Largo; the Florida Division of Recreation and Parks honored her by naming the Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park for her, a year before she died. Novelist Lydia Millet paid homage to the woodrat in her 2008 novel How the Dead Dream, a story of a young real estate developer from Los Angeles who, after some personal turmoil, takes an obsessive interest in vanishing species. A 1997 collection of poetry and prose by a writers' cooperative from Key West features a poem ("The Place We Live" by Robin Orlandi) in which the woodrat is mentioned as one of three "endangered native species," alongside the Key deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium) and the Stock Island snail (Orthalicus reses reses).

U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service Division of Endangered Species –