Other species in the assemblage include Reithrodontomys fulvescens, Chaetodipus hispidus, Neotoma floridana, Peromyscus leucopus, P. maniculatus, Mus musculus, Microtus pinetorum, M. ochrogaster, Blarina brevicauda, and Oryzomys palustris. A total of 240 animals were processed last year from these 10 study sites. Land treatment sites tend to be high in Pb, F, Zn, Cr, Cu, Sr, and Ti compared to reference soils. These accumulations in the soil appear to pose a risk to resident wildlife in these ecosystems. Our study has documented the existence of dental lesions in a high proportion of small mammals residing on land treatment study sites.
Dental lesions are virtually nonexistent on reference sites.
Bone fluoride analyses have demonstrated a strong relationship between bone accumulations of F and severity of dental lesions. Dental lesions are about 50 percent more prevalent in winter than summer in cotton rats. Immune function assays have also revealed possible alterations in T-cell and macrophage function on some land treatment sites data analyses are only preliminary, however. These physiological alterations observed above also appear to have an influence at the population and community level. Although all cotton rat populations show a numerical increase in late summer and a crash in winter, this trend appears to differ in amplitude between contaminated and reference populations.