Excellent article about hamsters. I read the story of the enraged scientist dunking the murderous mama hamster in a botle of cyanide in Joel Achenbach’s Why Things Are books years ago, but this provided all the details that I never knew. I had no idea a hamster could sever a baby hamster’s head in one bite, although if their teeth are anything like my guinea pig’s teeth I guess it’s no surprise.
I did see a typo: the end says “Although golden hamsters have been often been considered rare in the wild…”, which I believe contains one “been” too many.
This is simply an outstanding Staff Report. Well-written, humor in the right places, and highly informative. I had no idea that most golden hamsters today were the likely descendants of a hamster “Eve” from the 1930s.
I’m not much of a pet person myself, but for a few years I owned some hamsters: my dad thought that I might like the cute little gals and wasn’t easily disuaded. He could be annoying that way.
Anyhow, while I had them, I cared for them as best I could. Learned some things in the process.
He gave me a pair of them, thinking they would keep each other company. Females, because my dad at least had the sense to know that raising hamster families might be more than I cared to take on. Anyhow, after watching them fight too often, I finally learned that hamsters really don’t like each other - so, separate cages for them.
The other thing that every hamster owner knows is that they are nocturnal, and that they really, really need to run - so if the wheel is even a little bit squeaky, the cage MUST go in the other room.
Thanks for the kind words. It was a fun report to write. I think one of the most interesting things about the story is the great range of variation now present in domestic breeds, even though they are all descended from a single individual.
Great article, but it leaves me wondering: are there no adverse genetic consequences to the hamster race from the incestuous coupling of the founding members? I’m guessing not, but is that just because of luck, or does it have something to do with the nature of hamsters?
There’s nothing unusual about hamsters with regards to inbreeding. With respect to the original litter, among them each gene could have been represented by up to four different alleles (variant forms), two each from the mother and father. Serious problems due to inbreeding result when the population remains small over many generations, which can result in the loss of alleles due to chance. Because the original captive population grew exponentially, it probably retained nearly all the genetic variability present in the original litter. While its variability would have been small relative to the wild population, it was sufficient to avoid inbreeding depression.
Besides that, the very short generation time and very rapid expansion of the captive population allowed many chances for new mutations to take place (although the mutation rate itself would not have been any higher than normal). These new mutations are undoubtedly the main source of the coat color and coat type variants now present. Given that hamsters mature rapidly and have several generations per year, about 5,000-10,000 “hamster years” have passed since the founding of the captive population.
The interesting thing to me about this article is that not only do we learn the pedigree of the hamsters, but we also learn about the pedigrees of the Jews involved in the history. It was definitely and interesting time in history. I’d like to know the pedigrees of the non-Jews as well.
Colibri, thanks for your answer about the inbreeding. Now for a follow-on question: do non-human mammals have any way, other than dispersal, of avoiding brother-sister coupling? Put another way, if a hamster female had two potential mates at her disposal, one her brother and one not, would she tend to choose the one who was not her brother? If not, it seems to me that through sheer chance, brother-sister couplings would be fairly frequent in the animal kingdom.
Yes, it turns out that both mice and humans are able to recognize differences in genes for the “Major Histocompatability Complex” through their sense of smell, and avoid mating with individuals whose MHC genes are too similar (who are also likely to be related).
Unless parthenogenesis was involved, presumably they are descended from four individuals, not just one. There may have been a single member of one of the genders, but there were apparently three members of the other gender in the gene pool.
