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So, let’s jump on our today’s article shall we? Have you heard about sugar glider? Sugar glider or Petaurus breviceps is a small squirrel-like animals that are commonly seen in the Southern Hemisphere. Their habitats range from Eastern Coast of Australia to New Guinea. They are nocturnal and arboreal animals. For those who don’t know, nocturnal means that this creature active mostly in night, and arboreal is a creature that spend most of their entire times atop of tree. Sugar Glider belongs to marsupial infraclass mammals. The characteristics of marsupial animal are that they have pouch in their belly in which they carry their younglings in them until the younglings mature enough. One thing that Sugar Glider is special about is that sugar glider could fly. Although not really fly, but just gliding from branch to branch, unlike bats the only mammals that could actually fly, sugar glider isn’t flying as they mostly jump from branch to branch, gliding on the canopy and they are considered to be canopy acrobatics.
In the wild, sugar glider mostly eat sugary foods like nectars and saps from acacia and eucalyptus tree, that’s where sugar glider got its name, because they eat mostly on sugary foods. In their natural habitats, sugar glider mostly eats on saps from trees like acacia and eucalyptus, pollen, nectar, honeydew, and manna. For your information, honeydew is sugar secreted by insect that feeds on nectar and sap like bees, and manna is an oozing sugar deposit from saps of tree branch. They also sometimes eat smaller insects and also spider too. However it got complicated for domesticated sugar glider as feeds like sugar sap, honeydew and manna are hard to come by, and you can’t rely on insect all the time since it won’t give necessary nutrition for your sugar glider. So what foods is sugar glider safe to eat? Here are 3 Safe Foods for Sugar Glider to Consume.
Safe foods but nutritious for sugar glider diets
You need to be careful for feeding your sugar glider, as there are many cases of sugar glider sick and died from not eating proper feeds leading to malnutrition, obesity and osteodystrophy. Some people misunderstands about sugar glider as they think that because sugar glider looks very similar with squirrel, they try to feed sugar glider with squirrel feeds like nuts, fruits or veggies without considering their nutritional needs. Squirrel and sugar glider is different and therefore they need different diets. If you are confusing on how to feed sugar glider, here are some sugar glider feeds that safe for them to eat. Any information guideline here is provided and proved by Association of Sugar Glider Veterinarians.
- Pelleted Kibble
A nutritionally balanced pelleted kibble is one of the best and most reliable source of foods you can find to feed your hungry sugar glider. Kibble is specifically formulated to be eaten by sugar gliders to replace their nutrition they got in their natural diets with most of necessary nutrition inside of pelleted kibble. There are also many choices of brands for sugar glider kibble from Glide-R-Chow kibble, Nutri-max kibble, and Kibble plus vita-max kibble. This pellet is specifically designed for sugar glider, which means you need to at least provides your sugar glider with this on daily diets. Don’t worry about the sugar intake of sugar glider, as sugar glider needs a lot of sugar everyday and kibble is great source of its.
- Small number of insect
Remember that sugar gliders are omnivore marsupial in which they could eat meat or in this case an insect. Sugar glider in their natural diets eats small number of insect to supplement their nutritional needs. In their natural diets, sugar glider mostly will eat small insect like cricket and sometimes spider too. For your pet sugar glider, you could always give your pet with some insect once in a while. However, insect is just supplementary foods, as you still need to give them their main diets of sugar saps and kibble.
- Mixed of fresh veggies and fruits
Sugar glider will enjoy tasty treats of sliced fruits and veggies too. You could always give your sugar glider with slices of fruits and vegetables once in a while. Be careful to not give them too much sugar intake on their fruitful diets as it can result in obesity of sugar glider, a common occurrence in domesticated sugar glider.
In addition of these 3 Safe Foods for Sugar Glider to Consume, you can also gives your sugar glider with supplementary nutrition through multi-vitamin. If you want to give your sugar glider with vitamins, then try to give your glider with calcium rich multi-vitamin, as they need lot of calcium too, and they won’t get much calcium in their diets. In addition, you can also gives your glider with water mixed with some sugar in their drinking water, but make sure to not give them too much of sugar.