Kinkajou
From Costa Rica Travel Guide: Vacation and Travel tips
Kinkajou
The kinkajou is mostly nocturnal, spending the daytime in the upper levels of the forest in tree hollows, or dense vegetation. The kinkajou belongs to the Carnivora family, but eats mainly fruit. They spend about 90% of their active time feeding on numerous types of fruit. Among the favorites of the kinkajou are: figs, legumes, caimito star apples, wild nutmeg, ojoches, the fruits of the borage relative muneco blanco, hogplums, and cecropia fruits to name just a few. Kinkajous will select and eat ripe fruit when available. The other approximate 10% of the kinkajou diet consists of flowers and nectar, young leaves and buds, insects, small vertebrates, honey, and birds’ eggs.
The kinkajou is perfectly fitted for its arboreal and fruit-eating habits, with its flexible knees and ankle joints that allow the back feet to rotate 180 degrees backwards, enabling the kinkajou to descent or hang from tree limbs headfirst. Also equipped with a prehensile tale, (which only two animals in all of the Carnivora family have, the other being the binturong, a bearlike frugivore found in Asia), is ideal for an arboreal life. The kinkajou hands are similar to our own and are perfectly suited for picking fruit on the outer branches of trees. The kinkajou investigates fruits, flowers, and insect nests with its long narrow tongue.
Kinkajous unintentionally help many plant species they feed on by being seed dispersers. With all the fruits and flowers the kinkajou feed on, they often swallow seeds whole and pass on those seeds by means of defecation. And since they don’t tend to stay long in trees they feed on, they will often carry these seeds long distances before eliminating them. Kinkajous also pollinate flowers by means of passing on pollen that gets on their faces when they drink nectar.
Kinkajous have a lower muscle mass, metabolic rate, heart pulse, and body temperature than that of other mammals of similar size and they also tend to be more lethargic.
The kinkajou, being atypical of Carnivora, will often exclude others of the same sex from their home ranges, and they usually travel alone. But they have also been known to congregate in groups peacefully with each other, sometimes for months at a time; although it is not known whether members of such groups are related.
The gestation period of a kinkajou is just under four months, which results in one or, infrequently, two young. A baby kinkajou is born in the dry season and the male will sexually mature after about a year and a half, while the female will take about three years.
Kinkajous have been hunted for their meat and soft pelts, and also captured for the pet trade. In protected areas, or where hunting is at a minimum, they can be quite common and in Costa Rica they are among the most frequently seen nocturnal mammals.
