As most of you figured out this white creature is a white sugar glider (Petaurus breviceps).
It is a leucistic individual. Unlike albinos, leucistic animals still produce some pigment.
This white coloration would never serve it well in the wild. Something that white would attract virtually any owl that happened to pass through the area.
However, this white coloration does increase their value on the pet market. This is a captive individual.
Sugar gliders are the most commonly available marsupial on the pet market, even if they do make a lot of noise at night (including some pretty loud buzzer shrieks) and can give a pretty nasty bite.
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Interesting re the colouration and logic would dictate that white critters like this could not make it in the Australian wilderness,,,,but you would be wrong on that count. In North Queensland there is a white possum in the high altitude rainforest called Hemibelideus lemuroids I have seen one once but that was years ago at the top of Mount Lewis. There are owls there and the big spotted tailed quolls so its not as if there was nothing to see and eat them, Sadly their numbers are dwindling and fingers are pointing at climate change, The exception proves the rule?
By the way there is no snow up there in their habitat in case anyone was wondering but it does get bloody cold!
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/global-warming-kills-possum/story-e6freon6-1111118205787
Very cool!
Strange things do happen, and white coloration doesn’t always mean a death sentence!
That came out wrong. It’s cool that it’s white, not cool that it’s going extinct.
That actually reminds me of a story I once heard:
There was a fellow around here who purchased a large number of guinea fowl to control Lyme disease ticks and snakes on his property. He purchased about a dozen, and four of these were white phased.
The guinea fowl roosted in the trees in his backyard, and it wasn’t long before the barred owls figured this out. Barred owls really are nasty predators of roosting birds at night. Crows have an unbelievable fear of them, which is why they mob them when they encounter them during the day. Guinea fowl make a lot of noise, sometimes making noise all night long. So it was little wonder that the owls figured out where they were.
Over abut a month, the owls picked off every single bird– except the four white ones.
The white ones had to have been very easily seen at night, but they must have freaked the owls out enough that they wouldn’t touch them.
Maybe that’s what happened with this possum.
I suspect that wild critters develop conditioned reflexes as well as having inherited preferences.
As an avid horticulturalist, I collect plants like a dog collects fleas. Many of these plants are varieties of common species such as American Holly (Ilex opaca) that have unusual variations in leaf, flower, growth habit or fruit. In the case of American Holly, one of mine features yellow berries. When the winter flocks of Robins and Cedar Waxwings come through, they strip most of my bushes but never touch the yellow-berried form. The same applies to some of my exotic (Chinese species and hybrids) hollies, the red berries of which are a different shade of red than those on native bushes.
Interestingly, the birds have no problem eating the apples off my yellow-fruited crabapple trees–but then again, our native species of crabs were yellow-fruited to begin with.
Knew what you meant so that’s cool too. Don’t know why the white colour works but it is pretty freaky seeing a white mammal in the wild…unless you’re in snow country.
The long-tailed weasels around here do turn white in the winter, as do the very few snowshoe hares we have left.
But it does snow here.
The occasional white deer survive quite well in England. Maybe it’s because their main ‘predator’ the English motorist finds them easier to see day and night – and no one wants their coachwork battered. Actually it is no joke as quite a few people get killed or injured here hitting deer mainly at night, probably the same in America? “Avoid deer” signs in Britain always depict a red deer which seems logical as they are large and cause the worst damage, but it’s the smaller species that get hit most.
White fallow deer are pretty common.
At least in my part of the US, the signs typically show whitetails. But then, whitetails are practically the only kind of deer that exist in South Carolina.
We have Kentucky elk and the odd feral sika, but I don’t think South Carolina has any other deer but white-tails.
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