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Ancestor: Oryctolagus cuniculus domesticus (Domestic Rabbit)

Descendants 2 Myh:

Sheep Rabbit
Summer Rabbit

Size: 28 - 36 cm length

Dietary Needs: They spend almost all their time grazing and looking for food because the quality of grazing in the mountains can be poorer than lowland habitats, more so the higher the elevation. Fungi and lichens contribute to more of their dietary intake than their ancestors. They also eat grass (preferrably the flowers or grains first, leaves only if there's nothing else), herbs and sometimes any deciduous broad leaves including the elderberry. Like their ancestors they have a specialised caecum that turns poorly digested plant matter into caecal pellets with the aid of microbes living in the caecum. These pellets are re-consumed by the rabbit after passing.

Life Cycle: Wooly rabbits live in small family groups that look out for each other. There are usually fewer adult males than adult females in these groups due to reproductive competitiveness between the males and a general lack of tolerance for each other when too many males are together. Young males are usually driven out of their home group before they grow big enough to dominate other males in the group. This helps prevent inbreeding in young males are forced to join or form groups with unrelated rabbits. Young females not yet pregnant sometimes leave groups of their own volition if the group is overcrowded and suffering from food stress. Leaving a group often entails crossing rivers and steep valleys to find more favourable territory.

Groups will usually stay around ideal burrowing sites, even if the rabbits don't particularly live inside the burrows much. Mating occurs in late winter. Pregnant females make their own burrows for themselves and their kits insulated with fur, plant fibres, feathers and anything else soft and insulating they can find. Being placental, the 1-4 kits are fed through a placenta until they are born. Blind and naked, they don't leave the burrow for the next few weeks and feed on milk. Once their eyes are open and they have fur, and they start hopping around they exit the nest to join their family group and then don't usually return to the nest again except if the cat alarm is sounded by their family members.

After another four to five months of growth they become sexually mature.

Other: The seeding zone quickly became overcrowded in some areas with rabbits, especially where the cats had not yet caught up to following them. These rabbits evolved when overcrowding pushed some of the rabbits into the mountains and different selective pressures took place in these new mountain-dwelling populations.

Mountain weather can be colder and change much more quickly. At high enough elevations, warm days can switch to hail or snow, and nights can cause ice and frost to form. Rain falls more frequently in the mountains than in lowland areas and often quench those lowland areas via rivers that begin in the mountains. Soil in the mountains is poorer and thinner, with more exposed bedrock. Where burrows can be dug out landslides are common so the rabbits have a reluctance to use burrows unless the vulnerability to the outside is extreme (protecting newborns, escaping the presence of cats). This results in rabbits often toughing out extreme weather instead of hiding in burrows, and in them being exposed to this extreme weather often.

This rabbit has evolved a more heat-insulating, much more waterproof coat. Different fur types form layers, with the top emerging layer being very hydrophobic. This results in the coat being visibly covered in droplets in wet weather that never seem to soak in to the fur, they just run off. Sometimes they swim to cross rivers and their hydrophobic coat helps with this also - the air layer the coat creates gives the rabbit buoyancy, helping to avoid drowning in the hazardous rushing upland rivers. However if the rabbit is submerged for more than a quick crossing it can start to leak through the hydrophobic layer due to the water pressure and become waterlogged, and such a coat takes a long time to dry out leading to a high risk of hypothermia. So they don't swim unless it's necessary. Their paw pads help their feet mildly suction to surfaces such as rock, and their feet are slightly webbed to assist with crossing water.

In warmer seasons this coat thins out, losing some of it's properties but this thinning it prevents the rabbit from overheating on hot days. The thickness will grow back into the coat with the next change of season.

Subspecies in areas with more access to open flat lowland and with fewer mountains tend to be considerably less wooly. They also have more erratic and longer reproductive periods, shorter maturity times and may sometimes have two litters in a year.