Sugar Glider Diet
The Scoop on Bugs
Many popular pets are insectivorous (eat bugs), yet pet owners are rarely equipped to handle the insects or other live foods that these animals need. Pet stores carry limited numbers of species, and provide little information about the care and feeding of the prey, which in turn, greatly affects the nutritional plane of the insectivorous pet. African pygmy hedgehogs, sugar gliders, geckos, bearded dragons, chameleons, frogs, and marmosets and tamarins are among the exotic pets that feed on insects.

The most commonly available insects at pet stores are crickets, large "super" mealworms, small mealworms, and wax worms. Small mealworms can be kept refrigerated. Large mealworms and waxworms are sold in small containers and should be kept at room temperature. Crickets are sold in a variety of sizes, and should be housed in a small aquarium-type container and fed calcium-enriched food for at least three days prior to being fed to the pet.

Crickets are not usually fed while in the pet stores because of the large volume of fecal material they produce and the high turnover. Most crickets are fairly emaciated and may even be dehydrated at purchase. A pet fed exclusively crickets will be essentially consuming exoskeleton unless the crickets are allowed to feed first. Fruit flies and commercial earthworms are also available from commercial sources. These are supplied in specialized containers that often contain a food source.

A simple cricket habitat consists of a plastic container with ventilated top, several pieces from an egg carton (to provide climbing and habitat), several shallow containers (jar lids) with calcium-enriched cricket food, and a wedge of synthetic sponge or gelatinous cricket foods that contain both food and water. The sponge should be kept moist. This will supply water, and is easy to rinse daily or replace if it becomes soiled. The system should be an "all in-all out" one with no newly purchased crickets being added to a batch already housed. This will ensure that all will have at least the three days of feeding prior to being fed, and allow for sanitization of the cricket habitat prior to each new batch being obtained. Any dead crickets should be removed immediately. A one to two week supply at a time is suggested rather than a purchase of great numbers as the crickets soil their habitat fairly quickly, may fight and compete for food, molt, and die.
Additionally, insects should be coated in calcium supplement immediately prior to feeding to an insectivore. If coated for more than 30 minutes, crickets may remove the calcium supplement through grooming.

Feeding
Portion size for one glider is roughly a tablespoon of insects, and a tablespoon of nectar, plus fresh water available always. This may be increased or decreased depending on activity level, reproductive, or growth conditions. The amount of insects equal to about a tablespoon of volume is about one dozen small mealworms or four small, two large, two waxworms, etc. If fruit is fed as a treat, small bits of a variety should be "chopped together" to decrease the ability of the glider to pick out only the favorite parts, and a small amount of multiple vitamin/mineral powder mixed through it as well. It might be advisable to add bee pollen dusted over any fruit given.

The Diet
1.  50 % of diet: Leadbeater's Mix (1 glider portion is approximately 2 tablespoons)
Leadbeater's mix
a.  Warm water 150 ml (2/3 cup)
b. Honey 150 ml (2/3 cup)
c.  1 Shelled, boiled egg
d.  25 gms high protein baby cereal (6 ¼ tsp)
d.  ½ tsp vitamin supplement. ½ tsp calcium supplement
Mix warm water, honey. In separate container, blend egg until well, gradually add water/honey, then vitamin powder, then baby cereal, blending after each addition until smooth. Keep refrigerated until served. This can also be frozen in ice cube trays-one well is approximately one meal's worth.

2.  50%: insectivore diet (1 glider portion is approximately 2 tablespoons)
Commercial examples: Reliable Protein Products Insectivore Diet: 760-321-7533, www.zoofood.com, or Mazuri Insectivore Diet: 1-800-227-8941, www.mazuri.com. Copley Feed (about 1mi south of Metropolitan Veterinary Hospital at Copley Circle) can also order a product for you: 330-666-4741.
Live insects: make sure it’s a variety, calcium-gut loaded for several days and dusted with calcium supplement just prior to giving them to the gliders. (Crickets, meal worms, super worms, wax worms, earthworms)
3.  Treat foods (not more than 10% of diet): (Fruits and veggies under this catagory)
Fruits and vegetables: make sure it’s a variety, chopped. Add vitamin/mineral supplement, may also add bee pollen. (Apple, banana, grapes, kiwi, orange with skin, pear, melon, papaya) (Sweet potato, corn, carrots)
Commercial lorikeet or glider nectar can also be offered a few times a week
Quality dog food: 1 kibble not more than a few times a week

That is a direct copy/paste from an email from dr. Kim Cook, our vet about diet.

Oh, by the way I know it adds up to 110% there is a typo somewhere, she told us 40% nectar/leadbeaters mix on the phone.

Have you decided whether or not to try it?

I've stopped feeding so many fruits and vegetables recently. mostly because I've been working non stop. I have worked 9 days in a row (remember I go to school too) My next day off is WEdnesday.

I've been feeding my gliders much more ensure than I have in the past and their coats look better. Remember how I said Leia was missing fur on her tail for a while? It would never grow back but after I started supplementing just her with ensure it started growing back quickly. Leia is even fattening up a little bit.

Anyway, after that one person's glider diet from sudden diet change I've been very very gradually changing their diet over. My next step is to add the insectivore mix (gotta buy it thanks for reminding me) in, then to later change the ensure to the leadbeaters mix due to all the sugar in ensure.

That's great about Leia! I'm always wondering if I'm feeding the best diet and which "diet" is actually better than others.

Well based on Nala's bloodwork the vet said her calcium was very low. That's why I am going with her suggestions.

The diet makes sense.

The vet said that the 50/25/25 would be better if people really paid attention to ca:p and chopped food up finely so they couldn't pick out what they wanted. But the way we feed it the gliders eat mostly corn and not all the stuff they need.

Plus the vet said chicken and shrimp are high in phos and that gutloaded bugs would be better for them.

Rheasha I think this diet sounds great. When Ko took one of her gliders to a vet who had worked with gliders at one of the zoos, his advice was very similar in that he said to feed heaps more insects to help with there calcium intake. He also suggested feeding as many green vegtables as possible and both Ko and I have found that they love these vegies above fruit and everything else. It is very hard to collect enough insects for what they are required and breeding them isnt easy. Gutloading the insects you breed or the ones you buy at the pet shop is a great way to giving additional nutrition. A couple of weekends ago I heard an experienced vet in Australian naitive animals say to gut load crickets and mealworms with Wombaroo insectivore mix for a few days before feedng to your animals.

Too many foods high in the phosphorus blocks the absorbtion of calcium in other foods. So like Rheasha said if you are doing the 50/25/25 then you really need to take particular notice of the calcium to phosphorus ratios in your fruit and vegies.

Too many people worry about the variety in there gliders diet whne perhaps we should just be worried about a better ballanced diet and one higher in calcium. Seems the vets are still seeing calcium defiencies even in glides that thre owners thought were on a good diet.

Just a tip if you are using the 50/25/25, I have a pretty simple list(of the fruits and veggies that I use the most) that has 3 columns. One column has high calcium ratio fruits and veggies, one has "OK" ratios and one has backwards ratios. It really helped me at first when I started feeding this and eventually, you just remember what's on the lists. I still need to find the ratios of other foods sometimes but you can do that above under "Resources" and "Nutrition". Ideal Ca:ph ratio is 2:1.

This is exactly why we say "YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING!" when someone wants to feed their gliders off the wall foods...

With gliders, you have to learn the calcium to phosphorus ratios or you will eventually end up with very sick gliders.

so, about the crickets....what about that thing they can have that is bad for gliders? i don't remember what it was, just that i had read that crickets could be harmful....

Aflatoxins. If I'm reading the above correctly though, the Insectivore portion would be instead of live insects or am I not reading that correctly?

I've done reading about crickets and the risk of aflatoxins is really low.

From some reading and talking to people with lizards and stuff mealworm farms are more likely to kill gliders through aflatoxins than store bought crickets. :)

Jett, I agree whole-heartedly with feeding them fresh greens. My gliders LOVE it and when I give them a bowl of fresh greens - that is the first bowl of food they devour.

They arent going to love me tonight, tho. I picked out all the corn from their veggie mix.... They are in there right now digging around and I know its for corn.

Rheasha, the diet sounds very similar to HPW. I now make it using only 1/2 of the amount of honey and bee pollen the recipe calls for. The High Protein Wombaroo powder would be in place of the baby cereal and vitamins. I try very hard to balance their fruits and veggies each night making a decent CA:PH ratio. But there are nights when that doesnt happen, depending on what I am out of and when Im going to the store - and what is available at the store.

What is the suggestion for a high protein baby cereal? The baby cereal we have in the US certainly doesnt meet the requirements (Gerber,etc).

lol, i dont know. I emailed the vet asking her about this and if i could replace the leadbetters with hpw but no answer

WOW... i feel bad... not that i dont try to do it but they just dont seem t like veggies.. i've tried alot of different veggies and the only onees they'll eat are the ones, like corn, that people say not to over do.for the longest time i've been using alot of different fruits and veggies.
things i use the most:
fruits - watermellon, cantelope, honey dew, pinapple, apples, and grapes..
veggies - carrots, broccoli, califlower, corn, green beans, grean pee's, and tomatoes(didnt know if i should put that with fruits or veggies..)..
protien - mealworms, super mealworms, chicken, egg, and shrimp..
when i check on food dishes most fruit will be gone. the meal worms will be gone, chicken pushed around maybe half gone. veggies will MAYBE be touched..
the other day i kinda tested my theory that they werent touching the veggies and i put them in theyre own dish.. next morning they were there in the exact way i left them..
please let me know if i'm doing something very wrong because i dont want them eating it any longer if its bad for them..
thanks!

Gizzynator, do you feed BML or any other suppliment? there aren't very many high calcium foods in your list. I can check over to get you a real good ratio but it seems to have a lot more ph. than ca.

BRB and let me do some checking if you feed and they eat equal amounts of everything.

Ratio is Ca:p
watermelon is 1:1.57
cantelope is 1:1.67
honeydew is 1:1.83
pineapple is: 1.62:1
apples are: 1:1.6
grapes: 1.4:1

So your fruits alone are: 7.2 : 8.67 Which is 1:1.204

Meaning your gliders are getting slightly MORE phosp. Than calcium from the fruit alone and you are striving for a 2:1 ratio with calcium the higher.

I'm going to try to get more bugs in their diet and maybe change it around a bit over my christmas break. Right now PP diet is convenient because I can freeze it but I know they don't get a lot of variety. If I perfect a good diet for them over christmas and get used to it then I can easily do it during school.

I've been looking at a lot of the newer products from exotic nutrition (www.exoticnutrition.com) and found some really good looking stuff and I'm wondering if anyone here has tried it. First is the insect eater diet: exoticnutrition.com/INSECTEATERDIET.htm which contains whole bugs, the berries and bugs mix: exoticnutrition.com/Berries-Bugs-Analysis.htm which you can mix in with their food, and the gumivore fare: exoticnutrition.com/gumivorefare.htm which just sounds awesome and like it would be very natural to gliders. I am often really impressed by the ingredients list on the exotic nutrition products. I can't imagine how much fun they would have if you actually drilled holes in some wood and stuffed the gumivore fare in there.

quote:

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Originally posted by kyro298

Aflatoxins. If I'm reading the above correctly though, the Insectivore portion would be instead of live insects or am I not reading that correctly?

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you can either buy live bugs or make an insectivore mix. We're still debating which one to do, either way we are going to gut load crickets and all that jazz to feed as treats.

The gliders are doing very well with a mostly "soft" diet, surprisingly better than I thought they would.

if I use the original leadbeaters thing in this post I was planning on cutting some honey and maybe finding a less sugary but sweet substitute. We'll see what I come up with and what the gliders will eat, Who knows maybe some day there will be an AML- ahsaehr's modified leadbeaters.

Rheasha the leadbeaters mix on that diet is the original one from Healesville Sanctuary from the 1990's (except they used sustagen(Boost) as the vitamin mineral supplement then.)

It has changed very slightly over the years to 75% of the amount of honey they used to use so feeding less honey is a smart thing. I feed about 50% of the original suggested amount if that helps.

I'll check into some of the ratios of some of the other fruits but maybe adding in something like strawberries wouldn't even hurt. I know my gilders are CRAZY over strawberries. Or some yogurt or something.

Se I am a smartie pants. :)

The Wombaroo insectivore mix is fed to the crickets and mealworms thus gutloading them to then feed to the gliders. This not only gives them what they need from the crickets but also the goodness of the insectivore mix.

Thanks to Chris (roflmbo2) did some research and came up with using this in the nectar mix, this is what she found to substitute the baby cereal.
1.5 cup oat flour, I think she ground up oats but you would need to check with her.

edited for spelling.

gosh looks like i need to change my babies diet too. I don't feed them many veggies. They love cherry tomatoes. Is this a good vege? And I am planning to add broccoli, spinach and green peas to their diet. At the moment, I am feeding them mostly baby cereal with minced chick and a little honey. In the morning, I will normally feed them about 5 mealworms each and also a slice of either apple or pear. I am planning to add crickets into their diet.Also I am wondering what kind of high calcium food should I be feeding the crickets and mealworms for 3 days? I am totally clueless about this. I want my babies to get the best diet. I am going to fix the Leadbeater's mix right away.

You can buy high calcium powders at petco!

so, i was wondering...my babies also much prefer the high phospherous stuff to the high calcium stuff, (and their is more of it that i can buy at our grocery store, i guess just more of it over all) i balance it out buy adding calcium supplement. is that bad, or am i doing the right thing? the fruits are the worst, so with the veggies i really try, they get a lot of spinach and collards, but they don't eat them well most of the time so they get the supplement.

I am planning on adopting a pair of female gliders around Christmas. Is the diet on the top of this post a good diet.. Seriously if someone would say feed your glider this this and this I would have such an easier time. I am good at following directions, but I will constantly question myself otherwise and it will take hours to feed them every night..

my guess would be that this is a good diet, as it is highly recommended by vets, but sugar gliders are fairly new to being pets, and it is hard for anyone to say what the BEST diet is. but i think it is safe to say that you should also look into bml, hpw, and 25 fruits, 25 veggies, 50 protein diets as well, as these are some of the most popular and successful diets around. and a good diet is only good if they eat it. hope this helps.

My vet in Plano currently suggests the following as a diet guideline. I do not follow it myself. She has seen and treated fat diabetic sugar gliders and suggests to keep the sugars as low as possible.



Blender Mixture – use as ~ 35-40% of diet
½ cup Honey
1 Egg
1 tsp. Rep-Cal Herptivite
2 tsp. Rep-Cal Calcium Supplement
2 2.5 oz jar Chicken Baby food
¼ cup wheat germ
½ cup dry baby cereal
Cut out fruit juices to lower sugar. May add water if more liquid is needed during mixing.

Protein Sources – use as ~ 25% of diet
Crickets
Mealworms
Mice
Increase protein sources to add easily utilized nutrition – can dust with a calcium powder if needed.

Fruits – lower to 10-15% of diet
Tomatoes
Melons
Strawberries
Try to stay with lower sugar fruits such as those on the list. Use higher sugar fruits only as rare treats.

Dry Food Bowl – use as ~ 25% of diet
Oats
Raisins
Insectivore diet – such as Mazuri
Add an insectivore diet to allow a more varied diet and make up for loss of fruit variety.


Food sugar
substance = 100 g. g
Apple 11.8
Apricot 8.0
Avocado 7.0
Blueberry 11.0
Blackberry 8.0
Banana 20.4
Carrots 2.2
Cranberry 4.0
Cherry 13.0
Date 73.0
Fig 19.0
Grapefruit, Red 6.6
Grapes 15.5
Guava 17.0
Gooseberry 9.0
Kiwi Fruit 8.8
Kumquat 16.0
Lime 7.0
Lychee 18.0
Mandarin / Tangerine 9.5
Mango 15.0
Melon, Red Water 8.0
Melon, cantaloupe 6.3
Orange 10.6
Papaya 8.0
Passion Fruit 5.8
Peach 7.9
Pear 11.5
Food sugar
substance = 100 g. g
Red Bell Pepper 6.0
Persimmon 18.6
Pineapple 12.0
Pomegranate 17.0
Plum 9.6
Strawberry 5.1
Tomato 1.9

quote:

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Originally posted by NatakuHellFire

my guess would be that this is a good diet, as it is highly recommended by vets, but sugar gliders are fairly new to being pets, and it is hard for anyone to say what the BEST diet is. but i think it is safe to say that you should also look into bml, hpw, and 25 fruits, 25 veggies, 50 protein diets as well, as these are some of the most popular and successful diets around. and a good diet is only good if they eat it. hope this helps.

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The vet who sent me this email's boss or supervisor... i dont know how to explain it, Dr. Gary Riggs has worked at the zoos and this is what they feed insectivores there. I think it may have at least been around longer than the BML and definately sure its been around longer than the HPW.

Since HPW is so new you can't really say its successful yet, but I'm sure its better than pellets :)