Rare flying rodent caught on camera for first time in Sabah forests
Published on: Friday, August 06, 2021
Potentially the first known photograph of a smoky flying squirrel (Pteromyscus pulverulentus). (Photo: Jessica Haysom/DICE, University of Kent via MongaBay)
Kota Kinabalu: Researchers recorded the first ever photograph of a rare flying rodent and evidence of new behaviours of tree-dwelling mammals in a camera-trapping survey in Sabah forests.
The team collected more than 8,000 photographs, cataloging 57 species in total, 30 of which were detected exclusively on ground cameras and 18 exclusively in the canopy, reported MongaBay, a nonprofit environmental science and conservation news platform.
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Since few past studies have targeted arboreal or tree-dwelling mammals, scientists do not know how human disturbances such as logging may affect them.
Jessica Haysom, a doctoral researcher from the University of Kent in the UK, said she was intrigued by the vast number of animals that live high in the Bornean forest canopy, about which next to nothing is known.
“For a long time, we’ve only studied what’s on the ground because that’s really all that we’ve had access to,” Haysom told Mongabay. “But the canopy is just as important and it would be foolish to ignore it because there’s so much that’s going on up there.”
In a recent study entitled “Life in the Canopy: Using Camera-Traps to Inventory Arboreal Rainforest Mammals in Borneo”, Haysom and her team took cameras up into the trees, completing the first in-depth and systematic camera-trapping survey of an arboreal mammal community in Southeast Asia.
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Haysom and her colleagues deployed camera traps at 50 different locations between 2017 and 2019 in Sabah.
The researchers positioned half of the cameras in Mount Louisa Forest Reserve, an area that experienced bouts of logging between 1978 and 2008, and the other half in undisturbed, unlogged forests in Maliau Basin Conservation Area in order to document whether mammal populations can recover after logging.
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And they got some surprises, among many other things.
The researchers took what they believe is the first ever photograph of a smoky flying squirrel (Pteromyscus pulverulentus). Rare even in primary forest, the smoky flying squirrel is listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List and the only species in its genus.
The team also caught unusual behaviour, such as photographs of a northern gray gibbon walking upright along a branch. The camera traps further revealed that some species had a greater presence in the forest canopy than previously thought.
Haysom and her colleagues found high diversity in the arboreal mammal community in both logged and unlogged forests. In contrast, they found lower diversity among ground-level mammals in the logged forest compared to unlogged forest, MongaBay reported further.
“These results contradict previous research in Borneo that suggested that ground-level mammal diversity can recover within a few decades after the cessation of logging. The researchers attributed this to animals descending from the canopy to ground level after logging, thereby artificially inflating species numbers."
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