A squirrel that cannot cross a road
The Malabar giant squirrel (Ratufa indica) is the largest squirrel in India, stretching up to one metre from nose to tail tip. It spends almost its entire life in the upper canopy, leaping gaps of up to six metres between trees, and descends to the ground so rarely that researchers tracking it in Nagarhole and Anamalai Tiger Reserve have gone weeks without a single ground-level sighting. That extreme canopy dependence is precisely what makes it useful to science. A species that will not cross open ground is exquisitely sensitive to any break in the forest ceiling. Roads, clearings, plantation edges, even a 30-metre gap in tree cover can functionally strand a population. When researchers map where Malabar giant squirrel colonies stop, they are mapping where the forest stops functioning as a connected system.
