Sugar Gliders!  Maybe you’ve heard of them, maybe you haven’t.  Just the name of this animal is enough to make a person’s eyes swim with visions of cuteness, and you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that.  For the uninitiated, a sugar glider is a flying-squirrel-size marsupial (but not a rodent!), native to Australia and New Guinea.    

The name is almost self-explanatory: sugar gliders like sweet.  In the wild, gliders are fans of tree sap and nectars, although they munch other foods as well.  These little guys also have the ability to glide, sometimes remarkable distances, due to a thin membrane (patagia) on either side of their body which stretches between their front and hind legs.  So they have a sweet tooth and can glide . . . sugar glider!  Ingenious. 

Like many mammals, sugar gliders are social animals, and live in colonies in the wild.  They are arboreal, hanging out in the trees which they glide to and from so well.  You might have seen pictures of sugar gliders in flight, their arms always stretched out to full capacity.  So . . . why is that?  Are they trying to scare their unassuming prey into submission, or preparing to claw at whatever they land on?  Laughable, but no.  In order to stretch their gliding membrane taut and get the most glide for the jump, the glider has to stretch its arms out so it gives the impression of wanting to hug anything that gets in its way while soaring through the air.  Their long tail serves as the in-flight rudder.  It’s also great for balance when scampering around in the trees.  Despite being distantly related to the possum, sugar gliders cannot hang by their tails!  (Well, for that matter, adult possums can’t either)     

A glider’s prominent eyes, which stick out from its head like an X-Files’ alien, give it away as being nocturnal.  The standard glider color is grey, with a light cream-colored underbelly.  There is a line of black running from the tip of its nose down its back, where it stops before the tail begins.  The tip of the tail is dusted with black as well.  The glider’s feet resemble a possum’s: the front two are relatively human-shaped and five-fingered, whereas the hind feet are longer, and the two toes closest to the “big toe” are fused together.  Gliders are equipped with nails on each finger.

Mature male sugar gliders are also endowed with two scent glands, which they use to mark territory and members of their colony.  One of these glands appears as a bald spot on the glider’s head, in the middle of the black line.  The other gland, not quite so obvious, is on the glider’s chest.  Females don’t develop these, so if you think you have a female glider and it starts getting bald patches in specific locations−you might want to reevaluate the gender of your glider.  Really though, it’s quite easy to tell a male and female glider apart.  Even when gliders are young, the male’s scrotum is easily visible on the underside of his body, about the size of a large green pea.  A female has no extra bulges down under.         

Finally, we alight on the sugar gliders’ relatives.  Some of these guys look strikingly like a sugar glider.  But of course they aren’t.  The Australian squirrel glider is probably the most similar in appearance to our friendly sugar glider.  In fact, these two animals are nigh impossible for an inexperienced glider viewer to differentiate, the only real difference being that the squirrel glider is slightly larger (and less streamlined looking in my opinion) than the sugar glider.  The mahogany glider is another sugar glider look-alike, although the mahogany glider is down to so few numbers that chances are you won’t see much of it anywhere.  The Leadbeater’s possum, while retaining the same approximate shape as a sugar glider, is mostly brown all over, and its eyes aren’t as dark as a sugar gliders’.  Not hard to tell the difference here.  Lastly, there is the yellow-bellied glider, which while it might have the same coloration as a sugar glider, is roughly the size of a rabbit.  Yes, no confusion about who’s who here!

Now that we’ve covered basic sugar glider physiology and geography, our article comes to a close, but be on the lookout for further information about caring for sugar gliders as pets!  I hope to make weekly installments, and am planning on at least two or three more articles about glider care.