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Dwarf/Russian
Hamster Minisite |
Syrian
Hamsters Vital
Statistics
A brief history The earliest known
description of Syrian Hamsters was published over 200 years ago in 1797. It
occurred in the second edition of a book called "The Natural History of
Aleppo by Alexander Russell." The passage
on the Syrian Hamster from this book is very interesting and goes as follows
".......The Hamster is less common than the Field Mouse. I once found
upon dissecting one of them, the pouch on each side stuffed with young French
beans, arranged lengthways so exactly and close to each other, that it
appeared strange by what mechanism it had been effected; for the membrane
which forms the pouch, though muscular, is thin and the most expert fingers
could not have packed the beans in more regular order. When they were laid
loosely on the table, they formed a heap three times the bulk of the animal’s
body....." The Syrian
Hamster was first recognised as a new species in
1839 by George Robert Waterhouse, the Curator of the London Zoological
Society. He presented the "new" species at a meeting of the Society
on the 9th April 1839 and the female he presented is now stuffed and viewable
still at the London Natural History Museum. Originally the Syrian was called Cricetus Auratus,
but the genus Cricetus
was later changed to Mesocricetus
giving the scientific name we know today: Mesocricetus Auratus. The majority
of Syrian hamsters in captivity these days are bred from a family captured by
a man named Israel Aharoni, a zoologist, at the
request of Saul Alder, a researcher on the disease Leishmaniasis.
Saul had originally been using the Chinese Hamster as his test subjects but
they were not easy to breed and he needed hamsters that would reproduce
without difficulty. On 12th April
1930, the residents of a small Syrian village were employed to hunt out the
hamster in nearby fields that appeared to have a colony. They dug in many
areas destroying a good proportion of the wheat field, but after a few hours
of hard work they succeeded in raising eight feet underground the complete
nest of a female and her eleven young. It was
assumed that the mother would care for her infants and raise them well with
no problems, so the whole family were placed in a
secure box. The stress of capture and captivity resulted in the mother cannibalising one of her pups. At the time it was not
known that this is a natural stress response in hamsters and so the mother
was removed and put in a bottle of cyanide to kill her. The remaining pups
were hand reared (there is no record of the approximate age of the litter,
but their eyes were still closed when captured) with some deaths and two
escapees. Four of the litter remained and survived to adulthood. There is
some discrepancy over what combination of males and females were in this
four, some reports say the remaining four consisted of three males and a
single female. However, the statement is contradicted by S. Alder in 1948; in
which he claimed that one male and three females survived and one female was
later killed by the male. Regardless of this, the hamsters were later
successfully were bred in the laboratory. The resulting hamster line was used
extensively in laboratories until they were introduced into the British pet
market in the 1940s. The first
British hamster club was formed in 1945. Due to the length of time that the
Syrian has been a popular pet, it has emerged with a number of different coat
colours. The wild, or
natural coat colour is a deep gold, resulting in
the knickname “Golden Hamster”. In the wild Syrian
hamsters live deep underground in burrows, often several feet in depth. Like
most hamsters, the Syrian is nocturnal, and spends most of its day sleeping. There are
several nicknames for the Syrian Hamster including: “Golden”, “Teddybear” (for long haired hamsters) and “Black bear”. |
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