This lemming’s entire known range sits far to the southwest of the mainland, on a handful of Aleutian Islands, principally Unalaska and Umnak, cut off from the rest of Alaska by open water for thousands of years. It doesn’t occur on the North Slope or in the Interior at all; its story is an island story.
Like its collared lemming relatives, it almost certainly molts to a white winter coat and grows the enlarged, double-clawed front feet the genus uses to dig through snow and frozen ground. It lives on treeless, wind-scoured island tundra shaped by the surrounding Bering Sea, not the river valleys or boreal forest that define most of interior Alaska’s mammals.
The 308 GBIF records for this species come almost entirely from old museum specimens rather than living observation, and there are zero iNaturalist records at all. That blank spot doesn’t mean the species has disappeared. The Aleutians are logistically hard to reach and rarely surveyed for small mammals, so a lack of fresh sightings mostly reflects how little anyone has looked. It’s exactly the gap the IUCN’s Data Deficient rating is built to acknowledge.
Full species profile
