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JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY 
The habits of this race are quite unlike those of typical alleni, as 
described by Chapman^ and Bangs.® In the Okeechobee region the 
animals are found, not in ponds or marshes, but in dry or moist peat at 
a considerable distance from the lake shore. Before the lowering of 
the lake by drainage canals, however, the water must have extended 
close to the areas occupied by the rats and probably at times over- 
flowed them. 
1 could get no positive evidence, however, that these rats ever built 
houses in the water, as alleni is known to do. Their burrows or tunnels 
were found in both neglected and cultivated fields, in cane patches, and 
even in dooryards and gardens. In the largest colony discovered, the 
tunnels ramified the friable peat soil in all directions, but apparently 
extended to no great depth; only small mounds of peat were found about 
the entrances. The rats were easily caught in unbaited steel traps 
or in Schuyler rat traps baited with banana. 
In a small, brackish marsh at the head of Barnes Biver, about 8 
miles east of Chokoloskee, I found a small colony of these water-rats 
and trapped a single specimen. This is the first record from the west 
coast of Florida, but residents stated that the animals are abundant in 
similar situations near the head of Turner’s River and doubtless all the 
way down to the coast to Cape Sable. At this locality their tunnels 
were in wet muck in a part of the marsh containing a dense growth of 
switch grass with much of the old growth matted down on the ground. 
Good-sized piles of muck had been scratched out of some of the burrows 
and in a few cases the holes had been plugged with a round ball of soft 
muck. Deep trails led from one hole to another, but I could not find 
that any trails led to the pond a few yards away where cat-tail flags 
grew abundantly. Many pieces of flag stems, presumably cut by the 
rats, were floating on the water. 
2 Chapman, F. M., Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., II, pp. 119-122, 1889. 
^ Bangs, O., Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., Vol. 28, pp. 182-183, 1898. 
