Range of Movement of Some Malayan Rats

Abstract

Although accounts of experiments involving the trapping and retrapping of marked rodents are now numerous, no such studies seem to have been made of the many species of rats in Southeast Asia. Experiments of this sort have recently been carried out in Malaya on rats which are the hosts of the chiggers which transmit mite-typhus (scrub-typhus). Unlike most such studies, interest was centered rather on differences between species than on differences between individuals of the same species, and a method was sought of expressing an “average” home range for such species. In attempting to do this it became clear that the customary methods of estimating home range, such as those summarized by Stickel (1954), were not in fact applicable to the problem, since the “home range,” as usually understood, could not be exactly delimited. The concept of the home range has, therefore, been...