A flying squirrel sniffs its way along a branch.
Flying squirrels glide from one treetop to another in search of food. They can reach heights of up to 90 m, or 295 feet, from the ground. At that height, hunting during the dark nocturnal hours, a flying squirrel needs a powerful nose to detect food on the forest floor. They have adapted their noses to several other purposes as well.
Finding Truffles
Truffles are the part of an underground mushroom that bears fruit. Flying squirrels use their sensitive noses to identify truffles by the truffles' pungent smell. This is advantageous to not only the squirrel, which gets a tasty meal, but also the truffle spores. After the squirrel consumes the truffle, it later excretes its feces with the spores allowing new truffles to grow to whichever new area the squirrel has traveled. The squirrel droppings contain yeast which stimulates truffle growth.
Sensing a Predator
A study funded by the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center revealed that flying squirrels use their noses to avoid predators. The researchers experimented on captive flying squirrels by giving them the choice of various nest boxes. The control boxes were unscented, and the experiment boxes contained the scents of squirrel predators like the corn snake, the king snake and the bobcat. The squirrels avoided the predator-scented boxes. The scientists hypothesized that predator scents could be used as a deterrent for flying squirrels in the future.
Detecting Other Squirrels
The naturalist Lawrence Kilham, in a treatise on the reproductive behavior of white-breasted nuthatches, confirms that flying squirrels mark their territory by urinating. Other squirrels will pick up a competing squirrel's scent with their keen noses and know which places to avoid. Considering all the distance that flying squirrels cover in a night of hunting, due to their gliding abilities, there should be plenty of other trees in the forest where a late-coming squirrel can nest.
Finding Other Food
The flying squirrel, in addition to eating truffles, consumes small insects as well. They also eat the carrion of animals, which emits a strong odor that they use their noses to find. Like any squirrel, flying squirrels enjoy eating acorns. When a flying squirrel lays droppings containing acorns, these acorns can be deposited as far away as 3 km, the amount of ground a flying squirrel is capable of covering in a night. The acorns can then begin the process of regenerating into new trees.
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