We first became familiar with hamsters because we or someone we knew had a hamster as a child. But do you know that hamsters are actually not the best-fit kind of pet for a child?
Today we learn 10 cool hamster facts. Hamsters were just recently domesticated in 1930. How can these wild hamster facts teach you to be a better pet owner? You will learn a lot of Hamster facts, especially about how these animals live in the wild.
WATCH THIS COOL HAMSTER FACTS VIDEO
10 HAMSTER FACTS THAT YOU DIDN’T KNOW
Pet hamsters were recently domesticated in the 1930s and had nearly identical traits to wild hamsters. Learning how hamster survive in their natural environment will help you be a better pet owner.
What many don’t know, hamsters are actually not the best pets for kids. While these are tiny animals, due to their size, hamsters develop a aggressive defence mechanism. These natural instincts are still intact in domesticated hamsters.
Learn with me about hamsters – what are the differences between wild hamsters and domesticated hamsters? Are these rodents good pets?
CHECK OUT: Earthworm facts and Facts about bats
1. Hoarders and Pouches
In Syria, the first hamsters were discovered in 1797. They were later named after the German word “Hamstern,” which translates to “hoarder.”
This makes sense because hamsters spend most of their energy collecting as much food as possible in the wild. They even have cheek pouches that can be stuffed all the way back to their hips. They often have to travel many miles to find food, and their cheek pouches act as biological backpacks.
So, if you see your pet hamster stuffing a ton of seeds into its mouth, it doesn’t mean it is on a wild food binge! The hamster is moving food to a hidden location in the den, not being a fatass.
2. Evergrowing Teeth
Hamsters, like all rodents, have front teeth that grow and grow forever. This trait evolved because, in the wild, rodents generally rely upon challenging food sources.
They eat things with shells, and cracking the shell can easily crack their small incisor teeth too. In nature, having permanently broken teeth often leads to death by starvation. Rodents don’t know how to operate a nutcracker.
Luckily for the hamster, if it breaks a tooth, it only has to wait about a month for it to grow back. Seeds and nuts have a good shelf life, unlike the other things they eat, like insects, fruits, and fresh veggies.
As a pet owner, you need to be aware of this fact because a hamster’s teeth can grow so long that, at first, they seal the mouth shut and then puncture the brain.
To avoid this, every domestic hamster needs a chew toy to keep its teeth at a healthy length.
3. Burrows
Hamsters are native to extreme environments like northern Russia and the deserts of the middle east. Daily temperatures can fluctuate a lot here…
Today the high in Syria is 97 degrees Fareinheit, and the low is 60! So wild hamsters have evolved to live underground where surface temperatures can not affect them so much. These caves also help hamsters hide from most predators.
Burrows have separate chambers for their babies, food storage, sleeping quarters, and a toilet area. These burrows have multiple exists, so a hamster can run out the back door if something like a snake invades.
They naturally want to build multiple rooms in their home, which is why as a pet, they require a much larger and more complex enclosure than their small body size might suggest.
4. Foraging and Speed
In the wild, hamsters are easy prey, so they are primarily nocturnal. Even under cover of darkness, a hamster needs to move as fast as possible to stay safe. They run up to 6PMH and are known to forage up to 5 miles away in a single night.
Because hamsters are natural track athletes, as a pet, they will always need something like a running wheel to stay healthy. If hamsters were human-sized, they would need to burn about 10,000 calories daily to stay healthy!
5. Scent Glands
A hamster can get home by using spatial memory and leaving a scent trail to find their way home when pouches are complete.
Hamsters have 2 scent glands on their underside. They will use these to mark objects when out foraging as bread crumbs to find their way home, but mostly to mark their territory.
Hamsters feel comfortable surrounded by their own scent, which is a bit musky!
It is natural for your hamster’s cage to smell a little bit, and while cleaning, you should only clean part of the cage in a single day to ensure it still feels safe.
6. Eyesite and Predation
You might think hamsters would have good night vision to see and avoid potential predators, like hawks, foxes, and lizards but they do not.
Hamsters spend so much time underground that they rely more on their sense of touch from their whiskers and little bitty hands to sense incoming land predators. Hamsters can also use their noses to smell something coming to invade their den.
Wild hamsters are sitting ducks regarding an attack from the air. Their only defence is their tiny size, which allows them to hide in nooks and crannies. As a pet owner, you need to be aware that your hamster can only see about 2 inches in front of its schnoz, so it can not judge how high up it is.
You shouldn’t let your hamster run around on a table, because it might fall, or even jump on purpose if you scare it. Hamsters have very fragile bones, and even a 2-foot fall can be fatal for them.
7. Babies in the Mouth
Female hamsters with a litter of babies have 2 weird ways to abandon ship when running out the back door. They can stuff the babies in their pouches if they are small enough, and run away to build a new nest.
What a hero! But she can also be a total murderer.
If the female hamster doesn’t think there is ample food to build a new home… if food is scarce because it is winter, for example, she will eat them herself before running away! The strategy here is that I get the meal better than that snake. Can always have some more babies.
The mother may also eat just a few of the babies growing slowly or if her litter size is larger than her number of milk-producing teets.
It only takes about 3 weeks for a hamster to have a new litter, so babies are not as valuable or hard to make as human babies.
8. Common Species
Although there are over 25 species of hamsters, 5 types make up the vast majority of pet hamsters.
The typical pet hamsters are:
- The Syrian or Teddy Bear Hamster which is quite large at 7 inches long and the most docile and least likely to bite you.
- The Chinese Hamster, which is the most interactive and requires a lot of attention to be happy. It is the only pet hamster with a mouse-like tail. Many people mistake Chinese hamsters for a Dwarf hamsters.
- The Dwarf Hamster, which has the shortest lifespan at only 1.5 years. There are many types of Russian Hamsters like Campbell, Russian, Djungarian, and Roboroviski – to name a few.
I had one of these, and it was indeed an escape artist!
Syrian hamsters are often more friendly and easier to tame. At the same time, the Dwarf Roborovski hamster is the most active and fun hamster to watch. They are the hardest to tame and don’t like to be handled by humans.
9. Ever-Growing Nails
Just like us humans, hamsters have evergrowing nails. In nature, hamsters use these for burrowing, and they are pretty strong nails, more like claws.
They also use them for grip, and the nails get ground down at a reasonable rate while running around on the ground outside. Common mistake hamster owners make is only to put soft bedding in the enclosure, but hamsters really only need soft bedding in their bedroom.
If you don’t put some rough rocks in the cage, your hamster’s nails might overgrow, causing them to get stuck in their running wheel or on the cage bars, potentially breaking a limb.
If you don’t give your hamster a way to naturally grind down its nails, you will have to clip them, which is a pretty tricky task. It’ll stress both you and your hamster out.
1. Torpor and Hibernation
When humans get too cold, they start shivering to warm up. On the other hand, Hamsters go into something like a coma and get cold to the touch. This is called torpor. Many hamster owners think their hamster is dead when this happens.
Torpor is like a short-term hibernation and can last from a few hours to a few days. Please ensure your hamster is in an environment above 60 degrees F to prevent this. It may never wake up if you don’t warm up your hamster. The hamster is unconsciously waiting for its environment to improve.
Hamsters can also go into torpor from a shocking event like a fall. Torpor in nature is a strategy to wait for temperatures to warm so the hamster doesn’t have to waste energy reaching its average, warm-blooded body temperature of 100 degrees F.
During torpor, The heart also slows down to about 3% of normal operational speed… from a normal 300BPM to only 10BPM. Hamster has a super-low battery mode!
Next on Animal Science TV, we will cover vestigial structures. Dolphins still have tiny remnants of their long-lost legs, because they share a common ancestor with cows!
Check my hamster facts playlist and quick videos of gross animals.
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