ABSTRACT
Although not naturally reaching southern Florida, a distinctive tropical mammal that has reached the Florida panhandle naturally is the nine-banded armadillo. This species is now common nearly throughout Florida wherever sandy soils support their burrowing, including the northern Big Cypress Swamp. There are sporadic records for Everglades National Park, probably representing drop-offs by people; all armadillo populations of the peninsula are shown to have been started by human introduction.92,438
Marine and flying mammals have tropical representation in Florida. The marine access route is obvious, just as with tropical marine reptiles. Marine mammals are covered in a separate section at the end of this chapter. Bats, the only flying mammals, could have entered Florida from the tropics as well as from temperate North America. Six species have been recorded in South Florida, two of which apparently came directly from the tropics. The Brazilian free-tailed bat is the most common. One species, the Florida bonneted bat (Eumops floridanas), a new (2013) federally listed endangered species, is represented by a small but viable population in Miami residential areas where it roosts in houses and buildings, but is also found in a few very limited locations in other south Florida counties. Overall, however, bat populations in the region are small, and their ecological role in the Everglades is minimal.92,358,374,436,490
In the faunal history of Florida there is another ecological factor of more than academic interest. Numerous prehistoric animals, including what are dubbed megafauna (horses, mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, giant tortoises, and others), were present when Florida began warming after the last ice age. Most megafauna mammals were of temperate, Asian origin, having crossed into North America via the Siberia-Alaska land bridge during past glacial periods of low sea level. Excepting a few species, such as the American bison or buffalo, the megafauna had perished by 8,500 years ago. Megafaunal extinctions were possibly abetted by the most influential pre-Columbian mammalian invader of all-Homo sapiens. Native Americans first moved into the Florida peninsula over 12,000 years ago and were present in South Florida soon thereafter. Spear points imbedded in mastodon and other bones indicate that they hunted large animals and perhaps contributed to the massive extinctions of Florida’s post ice-age megafauna, but changing climate was also a factor (see Chapter 22).105,121,208,319,480,505,524,534,535
Representative terrestrial and semiaquatic mammals of the Everglades region are listed in Table 19.1. Most native mammals are of widespread distribution in North America. Common examples include the Virginia opossum, gray squirrel, common raccoon, northern river otter, gray fox, and whitetailed deer. Other examples of widespread species that are present but now uncommon in South Florida are the short-tailed shrew, black bear, eastern fox squirrel, mink, and panther. The latter three are represented in the region by the subspecies discussed below. Other common mammals are species widespread in the southeast coastal plain, such as the marsh rabbit, cotton mouse, hispid cotton rat, and marsh rice rat. A regional pattern observed in several mammals is the occurrence of subspecies in the Florida Keys that have probably evolved very recently, after isolation by rising sea level (see white-tailed deer section). Examples are the Key Largo cotton mouse, Key Largo woodrat, lower keys marsh rabbit, and key deer, all of which are listed as endangered and are discussed individually below.
