Maria Josefa Senires Veluz

National Museum of the Philippines · Zoology

Small isolated populations are vulnerable to both stochastic events and the negative consequences of genetic drift. For threatened species, the genetic management of such populations has therefore become a crucial aspect of conservation. Flying foxes (Pteropus spp, Chiroptera) are keystone species with essential roles in pollination and seed disper...

The Philippine province of Dinagat Islands supports a huge array of flora and fauna with a high rate of endemism, including three species of mammals found nowhere else in the world. However, anthropogenic activities such as mining are rampant on the island and present a grave threat to the island's unique biodiversity. We conducted a survey of vola...

Small isolated populations are vulnerable to both stochastic events and the negative consequences of genetic drift. For threatened species, the genetic management of such populations has therefore become a crucial aspect of conservation. Flying foxes (Pteropus spp, Chiroptera) are keystone species with essential roles in pollination and seed disper...

Aim: Islands provide opportunities for isolation and speciation. Many landmasses in the Indo-Australian Archipelago (IAA) are oceanic islands, and founder-event speciation is expected to be the predominant form of speciation of volant taxa on these islands. We studied the biogeographic history of flying foxes, a group with many endemic species and...

Pteropus vampyrus, the largest bat in the world, has a broad geographic range covering much of Southeast Asia. The wide distribution of P. vampyrus and its ability to cross oceanic expanses makes management of this threatened species an international concern. Pteropus vampyrus is an essential seed disperser and pollinator of rain forest trees, many...

The National Museum was created in 1901 with the passage of Act No. 284 to establish the Insular Museum of Ethnology, Natural History and Commerce, and was later transferred to the Bureau of Science in 1904. World War II destroyed the infrastructure of the Bureau of Science, including the valuable type specimens in the reference and herbarium colle...

Faunas of old oceanic islands often have extremely high levels of endemism and are considered highly susceptible to anthropogenic disruption. We surveyed the richly endemic small mammal fauna on Mt. Amuyao in the Central Cordillera of northern Luzon Island, Philippines. We tested hypotheses regarding elevational patterns of species richness and com...

We describe and name three new species of Musseromys from the mountains of northern Luzon based on morphological and DNA sequence data. Previously, Musseromys was known only from one species from the lowlands of central Luzon. These are the smallest-known members of the cloud rat clade of endemic Philippine murids, weighing only 15–22 g, an order o...

We describe two new species of mice of the endemic Philippine genus Apomys, subgenus Megapomys. One is from Lubang Island, a small oceanic island off the southwest coast of Luzon, and the other is from Mt. Irid, a peak in the Southern Sierra Madre that lies northeast of Manila on Luzon Island. We also report the first specimens of Apomys sacobianus...

ABStrAct An intensive survey of the small non-volant mammals along the full elevational gradient of Mt. Banahaw-San Cristobal National Park in 1995-1996, 2004-2005, and 2012, using standardized procedures, produced records of ten native and three exotic small mammals. Four species discovered during our survey appear to be endemic to the park (Apomy...

Surveys of small mammals on carefully selected mountains and mountain ranges on Luzon Island, Philippines, since 2000 have led to the discovery of seven previously unknown species of forest mice, Apomys, a remarkable radiation on just a portion of one island. On the basis of morphological and cytochrome (cyt) b DNA sequence data presented here, we...

A single specimen of a small mouse from Mt. Banahaw–San Cristobal Natural Park, Quezon Province, Luzon Island, Philippines, is here described as a new genus and species. It is easily distinguished from all other murids by its small size (15 g), rusty orange fur, mystacial vibrissae that are two-thirds the length of head and body, postocular patch o...

In 2004 and 2005, we conducted a survey of the small mammals on Mt. Tapulao (=Mt. High Peak, 2037m) in the Zambales Mountains, Luzon Island, Philippines in order to obtain the first information on the mammals of this newly discovered center of endemism. We also tested two hypotheses regarding the relationship of species richness with elevation and...

We investigated the phylogenetic relationship and differences in the song structure between the Philippine Bush Warbler (Cettia seebohmi) and the Japanese Bush Warbler (C. diphone). We compared complete sequences of the mitochondrial cyt-b gene of C. seebohmi to those of other Cettia taxa from GenBank and found C. seebohmi formed a monophyletic gro...