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The Phalangeridae are a family of mostly nocturnal marsupials native to Australia, New Guinea, and Eastern Indonesia, including the cuscuses, brushtail possums, and their close relatives. Considered a type of possum, most species are arboreal, and they inhabit a wide range of forest habitats from alpine woodland to eucalypt forest and tropical ...
When feeding, the possum's molars slice through the leaves, slitting them into pieces. The possum's gastrointestinal tract sends the fine particles to the caecum and the coarse ones to the colon. [4] These particles stay in the caecum for up to 70 hours where the cell walls and tanned cytoplasts are partially digested. [12]
The common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula, from the Greek for "furry tailed" and the Latin for "little fox", previously in the genus Phalangista [4]) is a nocturnal, semiarboreal marsupial of the family Phalangeridae, native to Australia and invasive in New Zealand, and the second-largest of the possums.
All species feed almost entirely on leaves. To enable them to digest this tough and fibrous food, they have an enlarged cecum containing fermenting bacteria, and, like rabbits , they are coprophagous , passing food through their digestive tracts twice.
Members of the Caluromyinae are essentially frugivorous; whereas the lutrine opossum and Patagonian opossum primarily feed on other animals. [22] The water opossum or yapok ( Chironectes minimus ) is particularly unusual, as it is the only living semi-aquatic marsupial, using its webbed hindlimbs to dive in search of freshwater mollusks and ...
The common opossum (Didelphis marsupialis), also called the southern or black-eared opossum [2] or gambá, and sometimes called a possum, is a marsupial species living from the northeast of Mexico to Bolivia (reaching the coast of the South Pacific Ocean to the central coast of Peru), including Trinidad and Tobago and the Windwards in the Caribbean, [2] where it is called manicou. [3]
The mountain brushtail possum is known to feed at ground level [13] [15] [16] and they are able to utilise hypogeal and epigeal fungi as well as ground-level plants food resources. [13] [16] [17] The mountain brushtail possum is also reported to require tree hollows for use as dens. [18]
Little time is spent foraging for insects, as it is an energetically expensive process, and sugar gliders will wait until insects fly into their habitat, or stop to feed on flowers. [36] Gliders consume approximately 11 g of dry food matter per day. [29] This equates to roughly 8% and 9.5% of body weight for males and females, respectively.