Top Ten Most Interesting Arboreal Mammals (Part 1)

Today, in honor of the birthday of Charlie Bowers, we are going to be taking a "Top Ten" approach to some pretty cool arboreal mammals.  FYI, for those of you who don't know, arboreal means an animal that lives in the trees!  So let's dive right in!  For Part 2 of this duology, click HERE.

10.  Squirrel - Although a fairly common animal and really not that exciting at first glance, the squirrel is actually quite the exciting animal!  Incredibly acrobatic, the squirrel is superbly adapted for an arboreal lifestyle.  Need more proof?  Click the link right HERE to be amazed!

One of the koalas at the San Diego Zoo in California.  Photo Credit: Julie Neher

9.  Koala -  Other than the kangaroo, the koala is probably the most iconic Australian marsupial.  Many myths abound in regards to the koala.  For example, many people believe that the koala is constantly "adjusting its altitude," so to speak, due to something in the leaves of the eucalyptus trees that they consume.  While it seems quite likely that the koala is constantly baked due to its lackadaisical attitude, it's not actually true: the koala just spends a great deal of its day asleep in order to digest the tough vegetation that composes its diet.  As a matter of fact, the 20-22 hours a day the koala sleeps makes it the sleepiest  mammal!  (For more information about the koala and its digestion, click HERE). 

8.  Primates - Perhaps the order of mammals that is most superbly adapted to a life in the trees, the primates include everything from the aye-aye to the orangutan, from the tarsier to us humans!  Thought to have started evolving in North America or Asia around 65 MYA or so, before even the dinosaurs died out, today there are over 200 extant species, with new ones still being discovered, like the lesula monkey that was discovered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2012 (pictured above).

7.  Binturong - Often called the "Bear-cat," the binturong is the largest of the strange group of animals known as the civets.  (For more about civets and their relatives, click HERE).  Native to southeastern Asia, the binturong is omnivorous, but seems to consume fruit the most in its diet, and is particularly partial to figs.  Although the binturong is labeled as "Critically Endangered" in China, the IUCN labels the species as a whole as merely "Vulnerable."

6.  Sloth - When you hear the word "sloth," you might think of someone or something being lazy.  There is a very good reason for that association: the sloth is quite sloth!  As David Attenborough says in the excellent BBC production "Life of Mammals," "The sloth moves as if it's powered by the wrong sort of batteries."  Sleeping around 20 hours a day, the sloth is the second sleepiest mammal, right after the koala.  While it sleeps, the sloth hangs upside down from tree branches.  Sounds like a lot of work, right?  Actually, it really isn't: the sloth simply hooks its claws over the tree branch, and relaxes all of its muscles.  If a human hunter shoots a sloth hanging from a tree, it will usually simply remain hanging from the tree branch, anchored by its claws!  Then the hunter actually has to physically climb up into the tree to retrieve its prize!

More Squirrel Prints, Plus Some Bird Ones, Too!

As I MENTIONED YESTERDAY, we got our first real snow yesterday, and there were some squirrel footprints in our driveway.  After I made the post, when I got home, my father pointed out some bird footprints on the back porch, and this morning I saw some more, better squirrel prints on our back stoop.  I decided to share these cool prints with you as well, since squirrels and birds are quite rare in North America!  (Sarcasm).  The first two picture are of the bird tracks, and then all of the rest are from the eastern fox squirrel.

Bird tracks

I forgot the flash for this one, but I thought that the bird footprints still looked pretty cool with the green light coming from our back-porch light!

Squirrel Footprints on Our Doorstep!

This morning we woke up to a fresh blanket of snow, the first (real) snow of the year for us!  Naturally this means that I must do all of my first snow traditions, including watching the Battle of Hoth scene from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, and wearing my Mammoth and Mastodon Madness t-shirt from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  Anyways, on my way over to school, I saw a few footprints.  I took a few pictures on my phone so they aren't very good looking, but I believe them to be from the eastern fox squirrel, the type of squirrel that is just so common around here in Boulder, Colorado!  If anyone knows otherwise please let me know, but I am 99.99% sure that this is what we are looking at!  The first two pictures are the ones that I took with my phone.  The first picture has an impression of my right index finger in the snow next to the footprints for scale.  The third picture is a picture that someone else took of some eastern fox squirrel footprints in the snow too!

At Last: Success With Primos!

Today's birthday post goes out to Megan Pullen!  Happy birthday Megan!  If you have a birthday coming up, just email me the date at cuyvaldar123946@gmail.com with the date and your favorite animal, and I will do my best to get a post in!

So the lock that I had ordered for my Primos Truth Cam finally arrived over the weekend, and on Sunday night I was finally able to set up the camera!  I made sure to use some of the fox urine in and around the area in the hopes of attracting red foxes.....and we got ourselves a hit!

For those of you wondering how in the heck I got fox urine, not to mention why, here is the skinny.  I started this thing called Foxbook.  Here is the description about what exactly it is, lifted from my "Foxbook" tab.  "Recently, my friend Masaki Kleinkopf and I started an experiment of sorts, to see whether foxes were in the area.  My mother had purchased fox urine to spray in her garden to keep garden pests such as squirrels from eating her vegetables.  I borrowed some and sprayed a bit on a wall near by to my use.  Underneath the spray site, I buried a plastic bin, and poured water into the dirt in the bin.  This turned the dirt into mud, and the plastic bin prevented the water from draining.  So now the bin remains muddy for days at a time, making it more likely for the fox visitors to leave footprints.  On the very first day, we got a hit, and three of the four days now we have gotten hits!  In perhaps my best pun yet, I created the term "Foxbook."  You see, it is like a social messaging site, where visitors can leave "Posts" on other peoples "Walls."  Haha."

So there is that.  We also got a skunky visitor, as well, along with a little child who tried to steal the camera from the tree.  Thank goodness for the lock!  Anyways, here are the pictures!  Enjoy them!

We have actually talked about foxes a great many times on this blog in the past.  Here are the posts in which we have done so:

• Channel Island Fox:  Shrinky Dink: The Channel Island Fox and the Island Effect
• Red Fox:  Guards of the Fairy Penguin
• Fennec Fox:  What Is It?  The Weekly Challenge #5 Answer
• Gray Fox:  The Fauna of South Carolina: Cetaceans, Foxes and Otters
• Red Fox:  The Fox's Animal Magnetism

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

Downtown on Dwellable

Animal Spotlight: The Sloth

Today's "Animal Spotlight" is the arboreal South American three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus).  The three-toed sloth holds the record for the world's slowest mammal: in fact, it is so slow, that algae grows on its fur, giving it a greenish color.  The algae helps to camouflage the slow animal in the treetops of its rainforest home.  In the case that its camouflage fails it, then it will resort to taking a stab at its attacker with its incredibly large claws.  Definitely not something that you want to take a hit from.

After perusing a few sources, I have come up with a list of the top 10 sleepiest animals, as you can see below.  The numbers are all number of hours spent sleeping a day. 

1. Koala:            20-22
2. Sloth:             20
3. Armadillo:       19
4. Opossum:       19
5. Lemurs:          16
6. Owl Monkey:  17
7. Lion:              14-16
8. Hamster:        14
9. Squirrel:         13-14
10. House Cat:     11-12 

 HERE is a link to an earlier post about the koala, and why it is so sleepy.  The sloth apparently is so incredibly sleepy simply due to the fact that its leaves are so poor in nutrients, much like the predicament the koala finds itself in.

Two other sloth facts struck me as pretty interesting.  The first one is the fact that, due to a few extra neck vertebrae, the sloth can turn its head 270 degrees, as you can see in the picture below.

The second interesting fact is that, despite the poor ability of the sloth to walk on the ground due to weak hind legs, they are actually surprisingly adept swimmers, as you can see in both of the videos below.

A Sloth Walking

A Sloth Swimming


According to the website of National Geographic, the three-toed sloth is labeled as "Endangered" by the IUCN.  Sloths live in Central and South America, and the three-toed sloth specifically inhabits the countries of Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guyana, and Brazil.

Finally, to learn a little bit more about the sloth, click on the link below.  The video is a short clip narrated by David Attenborough, and is also quite amusing.  Enjoy!

Saying "Boo!" To A Sloth

The Function of Cheek Pouches

A possible ancestor of Diprotodon (the largest mammal known from anytime in Australia, as well as the largest known marsupial known from anywhere in the world, and a relative of the wombat), the skull of Euryzygoma dunense, another extinct, megafaunal, eight foot long, quadrupedal herbivorous marsupial, is quite interesting: it has two extended cheekbones.  This gives Euryzygoma the unusual mammalian property of its skull being wider than it is long.  Although to most this probably doesn’t actually seem all that exciting, the extended cheekbones have led to two interesting theories regarding their function in the living animal.  One we will look at in a few weeks (the week of August 3rd to be more precise), but the other one we will look at now.

The hypothesis came about when the skull of Euryzygoma was first described.  The scientists who first described Euryzygoma thought that the lateral extensions of the zygomatic arch resembled those seen in squirrels, gophers and various types of Old World Monkeys, like the macaque and the baboon. 

 In the living animals just described, these lateral extensions function as cheek pouches, which make it so that the animals that possess them can store food in them.  That is why you so often see a squirrel running around with its cheeks puffed out.   

Some scientists think that Euryzygoma might have used its cheek pouches to store water; thus, it would not need to spend so much time near waterholes that were most likely infested with large crocodiles.  This would also help Euryzygoma travel longer distances during a drought, enabling it to move greater distances to reach waterholes that other animals would simply unable to reach, having a much more limited range.