Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Flying squirrels + treadmills = Science!

Why run when you can fly? That?s the attitude that?s gotten northern flying squirrels where they are. With big flaps of skin between their furry little limbs, they can sail from tree to tree, high in the old-growth forest.

This time of year, the male squirrels are taking lovers? leaps in search of females and the trees they den in. Increasingly, the squirrels have to cross landscapes where the big trees have been cut down for their valuable timber.

Winston Smith is a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service Forestry Sciences Lab in Juneau.

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In managed landscapes, if these squirrels are going to move from one habitat to another, they?re going to have to run across them open spaces.

Researchers have been sending flying squirrels to the gym. They want to see how much energy it takes the high flyers to get across the changing landscapes of the Tongass National Forest.

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We?ve actually captured some squirrels from Prince of Wales Island, we got some permits from the state, we flew them down with some help from Alaska Airlines, to the University of Wyoming and put em on a treadmill, we measure their oxygen consumption running on a treadmill.

If you?re like me when you heard that, right now, you?re picturing a squirrel with some weird breathing apparatus on its head running on a teeny, tiny treadmill.

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Oh, it?s not a flying-squirrel treadmill, it?s a regular treadmill that we use a plexiglass container?.[They?re not wearing little squirrel face masks to monitor their breathing?] No, they?re not. We have a sensor that?s being used within that little plexiglass container.

The researchers from the University of Wyoming and the Forest Service have found the fungus-eating squirrels get about twice as many miles per truffle by climbing trees and gliding through the air as they do running across the ground.

Knowing how much energy a running squirrel burns will help biologists predict how well the treetop-loving mammals will survive in a fragmented landscape. And that can help forest managers decide how much of the Tongass needs to be protected to keep these frequent flyers from disappearing for good. In Juneau, I?m John Ryan.