Animal · Australia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia
Sugar glider
Petaurus breviceps — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The sugar glider is a small night-time marsupial that sails through the forest on a flap of skin stretched between its front and back legs. A single glide can carry it fifty metres from one tree to the next.
Picture credit: patrickkavanagh (CC BY 2.0) · patrickkavanagh (CC BY 2.0) · Alessandro Di Grazia (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the sugar glider live?
Home: Forests and woodlands with old hollow trees.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Australia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 24-30 cm from nose to tail tip. It weighs about 0.13 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
The skin that lets a sugar glider fly is called a patagium, and it runs from the little finger of each hand to the ankle of each foot. When the animal jumps it spreads all four legs, the loose skin pulls tight like a kite and the bushy tail does the steering. For every metre it sinks it travels almost two metres forward, so fifty metres between trees is an easy trip. Sugar gliders are awake at night and sleep by day in a tree hollow, curled up with as many as six other adults and their young, which keeps the whole group warm. The name comes from what they drink: in winter mostly sweet sap and gum from wattle and eucalyptus trees, along with nectar, while in summer they hunt insects instead.
Find it on the globe
Sugar glider is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How far can a sugar glider glide?
Fifty metres or more in one jump. It loses about one metre of height for every two metres forward, and it steers with its tail to land on a chosen trunk.
Why is it called a sugar glider?
Because it glides and because it loves sweet food. In winter a large part of its diet is sugary sap and gum that oozes from wattle and eucalyptus trees, plus nectar from flowers.
Is a sugar glider a kind of squirrel?
No. It is a marsupial, so the young grow up in a pouch, like a kangaroo. Flying squirrels look very similar but belong to a completely different family on the other side of the world.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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