Talk:Lesser bandicoot rat

Photo ID and content
Are you sure that photo at the bottom is a Bandicoot rat?

I used to live in India and ...ahem...had my difficulties with bandicoots. To the best of my increasingly faulty memory of those years, they have naked tails like regular rats. BIG! SCARY! A taxonomist should look at this photo and try to confirm it is what it is implied to be.

India's a big place and all kinds of things do happen occasionally, but I don't recall hearing of regular cases of bandicoots killing infants. I wasn't in close touch with villagers, so I may have missed it, but maybe this also ought to be checked with an expert. Possibly biting infants, yes, but killing many, I am unsure. Snakebite and rabid dogs were the big animal dangers (the former in rural areas), other than insect-borne illness.

--FurnaldHall (talk) 21:27, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * The photo at the bottom is of Zyzomys pedunculatus. It is intended to be a representative murine to illustrate the murine stb category.  It is not meant to illustrate the species in the article.  --Aranae (talk) 02:27, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

FurnaldHall (talk) 23:44, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. That makes more sense about the photo. I notice that after four years, the bit about Bandicoots posing a significant threat to children remains in the article: "They are also seen as a threat to infants, as a group of bandicoots can easily attack and devour a human child," though with no source cited. As I said above, though I am not absolutely certain, I am skeptical that this is a routine problem. If anything, it might be the larger Greater Bandicoot [] that was an issue, though I doubt even this. Could someone knowledgeable about murine behavior try to check this out. A quick and very cursory Google search just now found no such reports online.

The article states that bandicots are adverse to scilliroside based insecticides, but then states they give 90% mortality. The article on squill / scilliroside states that most animals avoid it but rats don't mind its bitterness. However "adverse" means avoiding. Should the article state that bandicoot rats are "vulnerable" to scilliroside not adverse? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.31.202.145 (talk) 14:22, 26 July 2016 (UTC)