Vietnamese Water Shrew

The Vietnamese water shrew, Chimarrogale varennei, was described by Oldfield Thomas in 1927 from Dakto, Annam. A 2017 revision of Vietnamese water shrews by Abramov and colleagues, using genes and form, found that the water shrews of the southern Central Highlands (Kon Tum, Dak Lak and Lam Dong) are this species, while the Himalayan water shrew occupies central and northern Vietnam and southern China. The authors suggested a refuge on the Tay Nguyen Plateau may explain its history (Zootaxa 2017).

A 2023 morphometric study of 28 specimens found the Himalayan water shrew larger, with differences in skull proportions. As a water shrew it is presumed to be semi-aquatic, but no habitat or diet detail was found in the sources used.