Eastern Mole (Scalopus aquaticus)

County List:

Rule:

Mixed Forested/Nonforested or Nonforested Landscapes

      Grass
      or Upland Brush
      or Savanna
      or Fields/Pastures
      or Residential

Habitat List:

view size class definitions

Literature:

This large mole lives beneath forests, fields, pastures, and to the dismay of many homeowners, lawns and gardens. It prefers slightly damp earth with a loamy or sandy texture and avoids rocky soils and those high in clay.

About 25% of the diet is earthworms and another 40% comes from adult and immature insects especially beetles and ants; additional prey include slugs, centipedes and millipedes. This mole commonly eats roots and seeds.

Habitat: Pastures, meadows, lawns, and less often in open woodland, in loamy or sandy soils that permit easy digging. Often in moist (not wet) bottomlands where earthworms are plentiful.

Special Habitat Requirements: Soft moist soils containing earthworms.

Habitat Preferences: The local distribution of the eastern mole depends on the presence of loose, moist loam and sandy soils. Most favorable living conditions are in alluvial soils along streams, especially where forest and shrub cover provide shade. Moist and friable soils under forest duff in woodlots in southern Michigan are also frequented by eastern moles. They tend to excavate more deeply to attain moist conditions when surface dryness occurs. In addition to proper soil conditions, eastern moles require high populations of invertebrate foods. When fertilizers are used on pasture and croplands, golf courses, and lawns and other green space in residential areas, cemeteries and parks, these nutrients produce conditions for an increase in earthworms, grubs, and other invertebrate prey for the eastern mole. Producing environments for abundance of proper foods plus soil conditioning through tillage practices has undoubtedly improved habitats in southern Michigan for the eastern mole, presumably allowing the animal to spread generally throughout the entire Lower Peninsula.

Food Habits: According to Jackson, at least 80% of the mole's diet is made up of earthworms and the larval and adult stages of ground-dwelling insects. The other 20% consists of vegetable matter.

Ecology: Scalopus aquaticus prefers moist, loamy or sandy soils and is scarce or absent in heavy clay, stony, or gravelly soils. Likewise, soil types that may be suitable for habitation but are exceedingly moist or exceedingly dry are often avoided by these animals. Eastern moles seem to be absent altogether from arid lands.

It is doubtful that rivers present barriers to dispersal because the eastern mole supposedly is a good swimmer. Probably the heavy clay soils associated with certain river systems form the real barrier to Scalopus aquaticus rather than the rivers themselves.