Their name comes from early bushman who found they liked sweet things like honey and sugar and from their ability to glide between trees.
The Sugar Glider is the only Australian glider that also occurs in New Guinea and various neighboring islands, suggesting that it traversed the Torres Strait landbridge which formerly connected Australia and New Guinea in past ice age. It is, in fact, the most widely distributed species of arboreal marsupial. The Sugar Glider is also the only one of the six Australian species that occurs in Tasmania. It was introduced to Tasmania (at Launceston) in 1835 and it has become widely established throughout the island. Most animals came from the Port Phillip in southern Victoria soon after the settlement of Port Phillip was established. At the time Launceston was the major port that traded with the southern part of the mainland. The success and rapid spread of the introduced population was noted as early as 1851 in journals such as the Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Van Diemen's Land. Although many Sugar Gliders were introduced from the mainland, it is possible that the species may have naturally occurred in Tasmania. Few surveys of the species would have been conducted in the early 1800s and animals might have already been in Tasmania before other animals were released there. However, the Sugar Glider was not known to indigenous Tasmanians at the time of settlement which suggests that the species may not have existed there prior to white settlement. Notably, the Sugar Glider was well known to Aborigines on the mainland. The high population abundance of the species in some part of Tasmania is also typical of a recently species that formerly did not occur in a given area.
