Goodfellow's tree-kangaroo

Tree-kangaroos eat leaves.

They also eat fruit and flowers. They eat at night.

Goodfellow's tree-kangaroo eats mostly leaves, plus fruit and flowers. At the edges of forests it also eats grass and crops.

Leaves are tough and not very nourishing. Inside its stomach, which has many pouches, tiny bacteria break the leaves down over time, helping the tree-kangaroo get energy from them. It feeds mostly at night.

The diet is mainly leaves, supplemented by fruit, flowers, and grass and cereals at forest edges (Animal Diversity Web). Feeding is largely nocturnal.

It eats large quantities of low-nutrient leaves, which fermenting bacteria break down in its sacculated (many-chambered) stomach.

Tree-kangaroos mostly live alone.

Each one has its own trees. They are very hard to spot in the forest.

Goodfellow's tree-kangaroos mostly live alone. A female keeps a small home area of a few acres, while a male's bigger area overlaps the areas of several females.

The Tenkile Conservation Alliance says Goodfellow's tree-kangaroos are often seen in pairs, which is unusual for tree-kangaroos. In New Guinea's forests there are almost no large tree-climbing predators.

The species is largely solitary: females hold territories of a few acres, and males hold larger territories overlapping those of several females (Animal Diversity Web). Tenkile Conservation Alliance notes that it is often seen in pairs, unusual among tree-kangaroos.

ADW attributes part of the tree-kangaroos' survival to the near absence of large tree-climbing predators or competitors in New Guinea's forests. ADW's 1999 account noted that wild numbers had never been accurately estimated, and the 2016 IUCN assessment gives no population count.

Tree-kangaroos are in danger.

People hunt them, and forests are cut down. Some villages agree to stop hunting so they can come back.

Goodfellow's tree-kangaroo is Endangered. People hunt tree-kangaroos for meat, and forests are lost to logging, mining, oil exploration and farming.

In Papua New Guinea, conservation groups work with villages. For example, the Tenkile Conservation Alliance runs hunting pauses agreed with local communities to protect tree-kangaroos in the Torricelli Mountains.

The IUCN lists Dendrolagus goodfellowi as Endangered under criteria A2cd (Leary and colleagues; assessed and published 2016), naming hunting, logging and crop farming as threats. Tenkile Conservation Alliance states that hunting pressure in the center of its range pushed it to that category; ADW adds habitat loss from logging, mining, oil exploration, agriculture and lowland forest clearing.

Nearly every tree-kangaroo species is hunted, with many local extinctions across New Guinea. Community-agreed hunting moratoria, such as those run by Tenkile Conservation Alliance for related species, show how local people can lead recovery.