Hamster is a small animal that many people like to keep. Because it is small and does not require much space, you only need to equip it with a suitable cage and food.
At the same time, because it is cute, cute, easy to take care of, etc., it is so popular.
Being bitten by a hamster is very painful.
Of course, hamsters actually lived in the wild before they were domesticated. Due to their small size, in order to avoid being hunted, they formed a daily and nocturnal schedule.
Moreover, the habit of storing food is a hamster habit. Because when a hamster puts food into its mouth and its cheeks puff up, it’s like a funny scene from an anime. I believe many friends will call the hamster cute because of its appearance!
So why can a hamster that is so small and has almost no means of attack and defense survive in such a dangerous environment in the wild? I have to admire several characteristics of hamsters. One of them is that terrible body flexibility.
Girl’s waist? Completely blasted
Of course, hamsters can do more than just simple actions like the picture above. Hamsters burrow because they want to escape predators on the land. Many animals burrow, which is fine, but the passages hamsters burrow through are usually very narrow, making it difficult for many hunters to enter hamster burrows to hunt them.
Place the hamster on the experimental props. You can see that because the hamster is very small, the space required for the passage is also quite small, so that large predators can be avoided.
More importantly, hamsters are naturally flexible. When passing through the bend of the channel, the changes inside the hamster's body can be seen through X-ray imaging technology. The flexible spine allows hamsters to easily maneuver around the bends in narrow passages.
What’s even more incredible is that it can still turn in place even in a passage that seems to be only as wide as a hamster. Under imaging technology, you can see that the hamster's spine is almost bent at a 90-degree angle. Only a few animals can achieve such flexibility.
This characteristic of hamsters allows them to come and go freely in narrow underground passages. Even small predators can enter their territory, and hamsters can also rely on their excellent senses to avoid them.
The second characteristic that allows hamsters to survive even in the wild is a behavior that many people find very cute, storing food. It's just that the hamster's food storage behavior is not to carry food back and forth one by one, but as everyone knows, it keeps stuffing food into its mouth, and finally turns into a very funny look.
But this is just the hamster's "eye covering method". Although hamsters stuff food into their mouths, they have cheek pouches on both cheeks, and food is actually put into these "little bags".
If you use data, muscle principles, and imaging technology to analyze this behavior of hamsters, it will not be simple.
The cheek pouches of a hamster can bear 20% of its own body weight in food. If an adult weighing nearly 140 kilograms is used as a comparison, that means up to 28 kilograms of food can be placed in the cheek pouches of the mouth.
I don’t know if it looks funny or not, but I don’t want to see it if so many hamburgers are stuffed into both cheeks!
Moreover, when stuffing food into the cheek pouch, if you pay close attention, you will find that the hamster will keep turning around with a piece of food in its hand. In fact, this is the hamster adjusting a suitable angle to allow food to enter the cheek pouch at a better angle.
At the same time, when the food enters the cheek pouch at a better angle, it cooperates with the movement of the retractor muscles to move the food to the back of the body to prevent food from clogging.
In the X-ray imaging record, it can be seen that the hamster can even stuff food close to the butt through the movement of muscles and the function of cheek pouches, so the hamster can store so much food at one time, so it is not It's strange, but from various data and principles, it's so magical.
Perhaps not many people know that in addition to storing and transporting food, a hamster's cheek pouches can also transport its own babies under certain circumstances.
When a hamster relies on its keen senses to realize that there is danger, it will stuff the baby into its cheek pouch and move it to a safe place. Therefore, when many people raise hamsters, it seems that the animals are eating their own babies, but this is not the case.
Of course, hamsters do eat or kill babies. This is also due to improper behavior during human breeding, which causes hamsters to behave like this.
One of the situations is that when a hamster gives birth to a baby in an unobstructed and unconcealed breeding environment, it will be moved to a safe place. If the hamster cage does not have such a place, the final result may be the baby. Die in the hamster's cheek pouches or kill the babies outright because it can't find a safe place to place them.
In other cases, after the hamster babies are born, the owners often try to find these babies, which makes the hamster feel threatened. If the surrounding environment is too noisy, the mother hamster will panic and kill her babies to ensure the safety of the nest.
Also, after the hamster baby was born, the owner tried to touch the baby, which caused the baby to smell of humans. The hamster mother regarded it as a threat and killed it.
Trying to clean the cage can also cause an overreaction in the hamster mother. Because hamsters are very territorial creatures, cleaning the cage will cause the hamster mother to lose the sense of security she deserves, causing her to think that the environment here has changed, and then she will become fearful and kill her baby.
Therefore, a better approach is to provide enough soft objects and food while keeping the cage unchanged, so that the hamster mother can place the baby in a safe and comfortable place, and wait until the baby can walk on its own and is covered with a certain amount of hair. Touch the baby hamster.
Now you know that little hamsters actually contain so many mysteries. If you are raising or preparing to raise hamsters, you can take a good look at how they use all kinds of "all their skills" to eat food in a funny way. Take the cute look back to the lair and enjoy it!
