EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Sugar Glider

Sugar Glider (Petaurus breviceps), Family Petauridae
Chambers Park, Queensland, Australia

Explanation:  One night, while exploring the rainforests of Queensland, northeast Australia, with two mates, we happened upon this acadia tree greatly oozing its sap.  And soon that attracted a small bundle of sap-feeders.  No, not sapsuckers (there are no woodpeckers in Australia), but sugar gliders.

Sugar gliders are largely nocturnal and arboreal marsupials, where they can scamper along the vertical surfaces of sap-seeping tree trunks.  They wield opposable digits on both front and hind feet, making their grasps of the corrugated tree bark secure as they feed facing either direction along the trunks. 
  

Sugar gliders do feed on a wide variety of other fare, including insects, spiders, pollen, nectar, and more.    

At first glance, you might mistake the Australian sugar gliders for American flying squirrels.  Both have a form of thin, stretched skin (patagium) between front and hind legs that they can use for gliding from tree to tree.  But sugar gliders belong to a totally different order of mammals, the Diprotodontia, than do flying squirrels, the Rodentia.

According to one source (Menkhorst and Knight 2004), sugar gliders can glide up to 90 meters (nearly 300 feet, the length of an American football field, goal line to goal line!), although 50 meters (164 feet) is more commonly cited.  But without more-or-less contiguous tree canopy cover, populations can get isolated as forests become fragmented.

  

Information:
     Gracanin, A., M. L. Knipler, and K. M. Mikac.  2023.  Informing Wildlife Corridor Creation through Population Genetics of an Arboreal Marsupial in a Fragmented Landscape.  Genes 14(2):349; https://doi.org/10.3390/genes14020349.
     Lindenmayer, D., and C. Dickman.  2023.  Impact of Habitat Loss and Fragmentation on Assemblages, Populations, and Individuals of Australasian Marsupials. Pp. 1-32 in: Cáceres, N.C., Dickman, C.R. (eds) American and Australasian Marsupials. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88800-8_45-1
     Menkhorst, P., and F. Knight. 2004. A field guide to the mammals of Australia. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 278 pp.