A small mouse living in houses, farms and cultivated fields.
Fur ranges from light brown to blackish. The long, sparsely haired tail has fine ring-like scales.
Before farming, settlement and mobility in the southern Levant were already changing the environments animals used. Researchers classified Mus molars from several archaeological sites in a sequence spanning more than 200,000 years. At Ain Mallaha, in an early Natufian layer dated to about 15,000 years ago, the house-mouse subspecies Mus musculus domesticus made up all of the recorded Mus remains.
The researchers interpret long-used dwellings and stored food as sources of shelter and resources for mice. In later deposits, another species, Mus macedonicus, appeared again as patterns of site use changed. Shifts between settled and mobile life had already altered the mix of mice living alongside people, before agriculture.
IUCN Red List · Least Concern (LC) · Global species-level assessment (2016 assessment; amended version published 2021)
The IUCN global assessment, in its 2021 amended version of the 2016 assessment, lists the house mouse as Least Concern (LC) with a stable population trend; the assessment date is 11 September 2016. This global category describes species-level extinction risk, not the local effects of introduced populations. At Gough Island, researchers filmed house mice attacking chicks of Tristan albatrosses and Atlantic petrels during the 2004 breeding season and reported that mouse predation contributed substantially to poor breeding success. Population models indicated that this level of predation could drive declines in these seabirds.