WildView™

March 17, 2025

Rainforest Gliders

- as seen by -

Bryan Kao

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In the rainforests of Southeast Asia, tall and widely spaced trees provide excellent habitat for canopy-dwelling creatures adapted to gliding. There are tree frogs that glide from tree to tree with their oversized feet, geckos that glide with flaps of skin around their limbs and torso, Draco lizards that glide with colorful rib flaps on their flanks, and gliding snakes that fling themselves off the treetops and flatten themselves, steering their way to faraway branches by airborne slithering. One particularly fascinating glider is the Sunda colugo (Galeopterus variegatus), a mammal so aerodynamic that it can travel about 490 feet (150 meters) in a single bound.

Also known as “Malayan Flying Lemurs,” Sunda colugos are not lemurs but make up the order Dermoptera, the closest living relative to order Primates. They are not as closely related to bats as scientists once thought. Their main gliding adaptation is the patagium, a flap-like membrane running from the shoulder blades, between the limbs, all the way to the tip of the tail, accompanied by webbed toes on all four paws. Awkward and cumbersome on the ground, colugos spend nearly all their lives in the rainforest canopy, gliding around the treetops and feasting on leaves at night. In the daytime they roost on tree trunks (above) to get some rest, relying on camouflage with their bark-like fur patterning but staying vigilant.

Singapore, famed for its urban ecology, has many urban green spaces where breeding populations of colugos can be seen and studied. This female colugo is one of many being surveyed by a local researcher on the grounds of Singapore Zoo; she prefers roosting on a tree next to monkey exhibits. On the day of my visit the researcher, who knows individual animals by facial patterns, found at least 21 Sunda colugos in the span of a few hours.

Nikon D5500

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