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Where Are The Wild Hamsters?

2 years is what I've always heard. it's also about how long my old hamster lived.
 
Re: Hamster Life Expectancy?

OldTimeRadio said:
McAvennie_ said:
I've had a pet hamster since about 1987, obviously not the same one, been through about 12 of them!

Am I correct that the life expectancy of a hamster is about two years?
The longest- lived hamster I have had was my first; he lived to be four and a bit. Maybe it was something in the air in my squalid childhood bedroom/junkyard- I also had a mouse called Beast who lived to be nearly four and they are only supposed to last a year or thereabouts! He ran free on a big shelf in my room and just went on forever; by the end of his life his hair was all patchy and he was all wrinkled like a little Yoda mouse. :_old:
 
Since hamsters have such short life-spans are they used at all in longevity and life-extension research?

i suppose they can reproduce in about six months time or even less? This would produce at least 20 generations per decade.
 
There are so few in the wild because the Fortean Golf Society uses them as living tees.
 
Gary Player bred a strain which was part sealion. They instinctively balanced the ball on their noses.

The ones that survived each drive also clapped afterwards, which was a great help to less confident players.
 
In related news:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-p ... 283299.stm

Pet hamsters banned in Vietnam
By Andre Vornic
BBC News

Vietnam has banned the sale and possession of hamsters, whose popularity has been soaring.

The Ministry of Agriculture says anyone caught with a hamster will be fined up to 30m dong ($1,900) - almost double the average annual wage in Vietnam.

The authorities say the creatures are a potential source of disease.

Officials have also expressed concern that the animals are imported from China and Thailand without proper licensing or controls.

In a tropical Asian country like Vietnam, hamsters are not a traditional pet of choice.

That role has normally been held by various types of fish.

But a combination of factors including growing incomes and the Chinese Year of the Rat have made the beady-eyed rodents highly desirable.

They have been trading for $10 to $20 each and are reported to be a hit with the young population of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, spawning a whole sub-culture of hamster forums and hamster clubs.

But the authorities are concerned.

Traded illegally over the Chinese or Thai borders, the hamsters are unlicensed and unchecked.

The Ministry of Agriculture has highlighted the risk of disease.

The animals are just one of many imports that escape adequate scrutiny or epidemiological control in Vietnam.

A recent survey alarmingly showed that most anti-malaria drugs - in Vietnam and other countries of the region - were fakes traced back to China.

And reports abound of other counterfeit or dangerous items sold for human consumption - including rather startling internet rumours of a trade in fake chicken's eggs.

That last paragraph makes me have a vision of someone cracking open an egg for breakfast to find a hamster inside. How do you fake a chicken egg?

Anyway, if there's a place where hamsters might soon be running wild, it'll be Vietnam apparently. I always found them to be very clean little creatures, though.
 
Maybe they're all recaptured and sent into space.

A major German university must halt experiments on hamsters due to be conducted as part of a European space project over welfare concerns.

A district court in Giessen in the state of Hesse said Marburg University must address "unanswered questions about the ethics of the animal tests" it was planning to run on 36 dwarf hamsters, the Hessischer Rundfunk public broadcaster reports.

The tests, part of a larger European Space Agency project, were to investigate what causes the "sleep-like state" of torpor in winter white dwarf hamsters - a "naturally occurring energy-saving mode that allows the animals to survive cold spells and lack of food," German radio elaborates.

The aim was to investigate whether the phenomenon could also be used in space travel.But, once the tests were over, all the hamsters would have been killed.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-48747585
 
Without reading all the posts here: I thought hamsters are native to the Syrian desert? Not sure where I got that idea from, though.

I watched Fred Dinenage on children's prog 'How' years back explain that a Zoologist had read in old Arabic texts of a rodent (alhamastir) living in the Syrian desert but no-one knew exactly what was being described. He went out searching near Aleppo in 1930, lifted a stone slab and found a female golden hamster with a litter of pups. They were the only hamsters he found and possibly were the last ones there. According to Wiki, recent mitochondrial DNA studies have established that all domestic golden hamsters are descended from one female – presumably the one he captured in 1930.
 
I'd like to see these guys escape into the wild! Good material for a horror film alright!.

In a recent study published in the scientific journal of Neuroscience, a group of scientists regale their journey to try and use CRISPR gene editing technology to bio-engineer an extra-friendly and extra-chill hamster.

Like a good bad sci-fi film, this went horribly, horribly wrong (emphasis mine):

We produced Syrian hamsters that completely lack Avpr1as (Avpr1a knockout [KO] hamsters) using the CRISPR-Cas9 system to more fully examine the role of Avpr1a in the expression of social behaviors. We confirmed the absence of Avpr1as in these hamsters by demonstrating 1) a complete lack of Avpr1a-specific receptor binding throughout the brain, 2) a behavioral insensitivity to centrally administered AVP, and 3) an absence of the well-known blood-pressure response produced by activating Avpr1as. Unexpectedly, however, Avpr1a KO hamsters displayed more social communication behavior and aggression toward same-sex conspecifics than did their wild-type (WT) littermates.
In other words, the researchers used CRISPR-Cas9 to remove a naturally occurring hormone (vasopressin, and its receptor, Avpr1a) that is typically expected to regulate things like teamwork and bonding. Their hypothesis was that, by removing this hormone, the hamsters would stop regulating their friendliness, and just give in to being cuddly and adorable bosom buddies all the time. But in fact, in had the opposite effect: they were incredibly aggressive, territorial, and violent towards other hamsters of the same sex.

https://boingboing.net/2022/05/29/scientists-accidentally-made-a-vicious-mutant-attack-hamster.html
 
…they were incredibly aggressive, territorial, and violent towards other hamsters...
killer_hamster.jpg


maximus otter
 
There was a story (most likely from B3ta) of a boy with a male hamster, who offered to look after his mate's male hamster (separate cages) for a few days. The night before it was due to be given back, he put his mate's hamster in with his own and started to clean out the visitor's cage. But he didn't finish and as the two hamsters seemed OK together he left them overnight, intending to complete the job in the morning.
One survivor (his) - the other hamster had it's head chewed off and with much blood showing around the anus.
Debate was whether the buggery preceded or proceeded decapitation (or maybe during).
 
Go back about thirty years & people were staging hamster fights.

Get two male hamsters place bets & drop them in a gold fish bowl!!!
 
The usual excuse for seeing big cats in Britain is that they're escaped pets, or from circuses, but if that were true, why don't we have a population of wild hamsters in Britain? Loads of the small furry creatures have escaped from homes over the years, but I've never seen a hamster in the wild. Shouldn't they be more common than panther sightings?
The big cats and escaped snakes are eating them.
 
Which makes me think, if the little buggers can survive in Vienna then most of the UK should be no bother. But I think from what has been said previously if most pet hamsters are Syrian then they might not be as hardy as the European variety and so less likely to survive. Pity.
 
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