The northwestern marsh rice rat is a semi-aquatic rodent tied tightly to Gulf Coast salt marsh and wet prairie, and its Texas records line up with that habitat precisely: Aransas, Padre Island, and Brazoria all protect the flooded grass and bay-margin marsh this species needs, rather than being incidental refuge names.
With 200 Texas records, the species ranks 71st of 197 mammals in the state, in the middle third by record count. Only 6 of those records come from iNaturalist photos; a marsh-dwelling rat that’s mostly active at night in dense wet cover is not an easy animal for a casual observer to photograph.
Sightings jump hard from March through May, when spring marsh conditions and researcher fieldwork likely overlap, and drop to near zero in several other months, a pattern that says more about when surveys ran than about the rat’s true activity.
Full species profile
