A short video of a sugar glider asleep in the hand of their owner, curled up and then gradually emerging has gathered almost 40 million hits on TikTok! Good for them. It’s a nice little video but I’m not sure that it deserves to have been seen so many times. Sugar gliders are nocturnal as we can see by their large, black eyes which have evolved to enable them to see in the dark. There are many pet sugar gliders. In these homes the owners have to get used to the fact that their pet is active in the night and asleep during the daytime.
They enjoy sleeping curled up which helps to retain heat and they enjoy sleeping in enclosed spaces. They like to sleep with their families nestled together and curled up in their nest.
It looks as though in this instance the video maker held their sugar glider in their hand for a while during the daytime to the point where their pet curled up and went to sleep. They then ensured that they woke up to create this emerging video.
I’m told that they sleep about 12 hours and wake up a few hours after dusk and then stay awake, active until dawn.
I am sure that sugar gliders present particular problems to their human caregiver’s as they are so distinctly active at night. Domestic cats are often more active at night too, but they aren’t strictly nocturnal like sugar gliders.
As their owners are asleep during the night it seems that they can be prone to becoming bored if they are kept indoors which I guess they must be. The advice is to provide them with enough cage space and toys for them to be active and to a certain extent stimulated. They say that it is important that you adopt a pair of sugar gliders so that they can entertain each other. Also, they are social animals which means that they love, indeed need companionship.
Because they are active at night, they may make nocturnal noises and disturb their owner’s. They are territorial with groups of sugar gliders in the wild occupying a certain territory which they defend. In the wild they will defend a number of eucalyptus trees for example which provide them with a source of food. Males mark territory with secretions from glands in their feet, hands and bottoms. This begs the question whether a resident sugar glider might become aggressive towards a new one that has been adopted to keep them company.
They naturally live in colonies of 10-15. It would seem to me that it is better if you adopt a pair which are known to get along from the same colony.
In the wild, their home range i.e. the territory which they call home, is typically about 0.5-4.7 ha but they can be larger. While the males disperse to find their own territory, females apparently remain with the natal group. Is it better, therefore, to adopt two female siblings in order to ensure that they are friendly towards each other?
It certainly wouldn’t work if you adopt one individual from one group and another from another group because sugar gliders from different groups do not intermix. They are very protective and very aggressive towards non-group members. And they defend food resources from larger animals.
My research indicates that they are a popular pet in the United States, Japan and also Canada and Europe.
They typically glide a distance of about 20 meters, which is 70 feet. The maximum distance that they have been seen to glide is 30 m or 100 feet but in practice they may glide further.
Sugar gliders are not a subspecies of squirrel and neither are they rodents. They are marsupials and in the same family of species as kangaroos.
Postscript: the comment within the video which states: “walking ball of serotonin”, must be a reference to the fact that the sugar glider entertains and makes their owner feel happier. I’m sure like any other pet they do make them happier provided they look after them properly and it seems to me that there are some particular challenges with looking after this species properly.
Below are some articles on kangaroos.
