‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but sugar gliders eat birds’
Bec Crew
Bec Crew
Pretend you’ve never seen a picture of a sugar glider. Imagine an animal that can glide silently through the night, track down birds nestled in their tree hollows, and eat them, their nestlings and their eggs. Then they glide away under the cover of darkness, leaving absolute carnage in their wake.
This is what’s happening in Tasmania, where they’re known to kill and eat roughly half of the female swift parrots that attempt to nest in mainland Tasmania each year. Which is a major issue, when you consider that swift parrots are critically endangered and one of just three migratory parrots on earth.
Of course, humans are to blame here, too, because scientists have found that areas of Tasmania that have been logged is where sugar glider predation of swift parrots is the worst. This is because fewer trees mean fewer tree hollows for gliders and parrots to live in, which exposes the parrots to even more ‘visits’ from these adorable assassins.
Sugar gliders can grow to 30cm long and weigh just 115g. They have a gliding membrane called the patagium that is connected at the ankles, which enables them to glide up to 50m at a time. This allows them to escape predators – such as owls, kookaburras and goannas – and find food. They don’t just feed on nectar and nestlings; they also hunt insects, small lizards and other small vertebrates. They’ve been known to dismember and eat mice.
They look just like flying squirrels, but sugar gliders are actually more closely related to kangaroos and koalas. Their gestation period is just 15–17 days, and like kangaroos and koalas, they give birth to very underdeveloped joeys, which immediately crawl into their pouch.
Sugar gliders give birth to twins up to twice a year, and these twin joeys will remain in the pouch for just over two months. And that’s not the only thing that comes in pairs. Sugar glider females have duplicates of all their genital organs: they have two ovaries, two oviducts (or fallopian tubes) two uteruses and two vaginas (kangaroos have three!). These multiple copies allow them to have multiple offspring at different stages of development simultaneously.
A creature that moves like a bird, resembles a rodent, and eats like a cat – sugar gliders show that, in nature, strangeness can be a great asset.
A creature that moves like a bird, resembles a rodent, and eats like a cat – sugar gliders show that, in nature, strangeness can be a great asset.
