Long-tailed mouse

The long-tailed mouse, Pseudomys higginsi, is a native Australian rodent of the family Muridae that is found only on the island of Tasmania. It weighs about 70 grams and is told apart from related mice by its two-tone tail, white on the underside and dark above, which is about 1.3 times as long as the head and body combined; it is speculated that the tail helps with balance when the animal leaps across boulder screes. The species is an opportunistic, seasonal omnivore: fecal analysis shows it eating grasses, grains, bamboo, fruits, ferns, mosses, fungi and many kinds of insects. It ranges from sea level to roughly 1,200 metres in rainforest, wet scrub, eucalyptus scrub, sedgeland and low alpine vegetation, and a study of logging in old-growth wet eucalyptus forest found it equally abundant across all the forestry treatments. It is mainly nocturnal but can be active by day, breeds seasonally from September through June, and after a gestation of about 31 to 33 days bears litters averaging three young. Fossils from Cloggs Cave in eastern Victoria show it also lived on the Australian mainland in the past.