Species group · Mammals
WAnimals has 3 species of possum, spread across 3 families (Burramyidae, Dasyuridae, Tarsipedidae).
Ranges calculated from the profiles that record the figure, not from all 3.
Each one has its own full profile. This group does not replace them: it brings them together.
No species documented in this group is genuinely at risk according to the IUCN, with the data available today.
Recorded in one country.
It can spend more than a week in deep torpor, its heart almost stopped and its body cold to the touch, and wake up as though nothing had happened: it is one of the mammals that has best mastered that energy-saving technique.
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It coils its prehensile tail into a spiral when it sleeps and uses it as a fifth hand while climbing among the banksia flowers it feeds on.
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It lives almost entirely on nectar and pollen, one of the few non-flying mammals that works as a specialised pollinator.
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It is the only land mammal in the world that lives exclusively on nectar and pollen: it does not even take insects as a supplement.
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It has the longest sperm known of any mammal, at some 0.36 millimetres, longer than those of a blue whale.
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All the males die after their first and only breeding season: the hormonal stress of the rut collapses their immune system within a few weeks, a phenomenon called semelparity that occurs in only a handful of mammals.
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It can bristle the black tuft of its tail until it looks like a bottle brush, probably to appear larger to a predator.
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