Sugar Glider

🌍 Overview

Sugar gliders are small marsupials native to Australia, New Guinea, and eastern Indonesia - more closely related to koalas and kangaroos than to flying squirrels, which they superficially resemble. They possess a membrane (patagium) stretching from wrist to ankle that allows them to glide up to 165 feet between trees. Highly social in the wild, they live in groups of 10-15 individuals and communicate through a range of calls, barks, and crabbing sounds.

📋 Quick Facts

📜 History

Australia has barred the export of its native wildlife under the Wildlife Protection (Regulation of Exports and Imports) Act of 1982, so the gliders that reached the American pet trade in the 1990s came from somewhere else. A 2019 genetic study in PeerJ settled where. Sequencing captive animals from across the United States turned up 23 closely related haplotypes, two of them identical to sequences from Sorong in West Papua, Indonesia, and none matching Australian or Papua New Guinean populations. The pet population therefore descends from Indonesian stock exported through licensed breeding facilities, whose output has at times been questioned against official quotas.

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