Some Thoughts About How
Many and What Types of Syrian Hamsters to Keep in an Ideal Hamstery
These are just personal thoughts
-
not proven fact. In no way do they represent the thoughts of
anyone else or any body or association other than those of the author.
If you consider you have anything to add, please don't hesitate
to contact us!
Having kept hamsters and showed
them now for over a year thoughts turn to trying to uphold the aims of
the Northern Hamster Club - to continue specific hamster Colour
Standards and type and to produce new varieties of colour.
If you consider
a basic genetic type and wish to propagate it then how many of that
type do you need?
You must start with 2 obviously -
one male and one female. Consider the colour Black Eyed Cream
(ee).
At the age of about 6 weeks you
could mate them and produce a litter. These could be bred after another
9 or so weeks. Our average litter size has been 8 so assuming a
reasonable average of 3 or 4 of a particular sex then that means that
after 9 weeks you
could have 3 (on the lower side) more matings plus the original pair
all
producing around 8 hamsters each and so after 15 weeks you could end up
with roughly 42 hamsters!! But you wouldn't want to do that
unless you were just interested in producing as many hamsters as
possible to make a living out of it by selling them on at the earliest
possibility. Continue in that manner and you would end up with
very feeble stock with lots of health problems and if you were good at
it and had no scruples, there would be no come back and you'd have pots
of money(?)
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So the thought
enters - How do you keep good hamsters with a
true line?
Well here's a thought :
Start with 2 - a male and a
female. When about 4 months old they have matured and generally
stopped growing and therefore any energy for their formation is not
likely to be required after this age. If they are of a 'true'
type then they will breed true, so all their offspring will be Cream.
The table below shows a breeding
schedule
to maintain a line of hamsters.
Zero Months
|
6 months
|
12 months
|
18 months
|
24 months
|
30 months
|
Male 1
|
|
|
|
|
x
|
Female 1
|
litter
|
litter
|
|
|
x
|
|
Female 2 kept
|
litter
|
litter
|
|
|
|
|
Male 2 kept
|
|
|
|
|
|
Female 3 kept
|
litter
|
litter
|
|
|
|
|
Female 4 kept
|
litter
|
litter
|
|
|
|
|
Male 3 kept
|
|
|
|
|
|
Female 5 kept
|
litter
|
|
|
|
|
|
Female 6 kept
|
2 hamsters
|
3 hamsters
|
4 hamsters
|
5 hamsters
|
7 hamsters
|
6 hamsters
|
This cycle of breeding should be
repeated so that a new litter is produced approximately every 6 months,
keeping a female every 6 months and a male every 12 months on average.
Considering the life expectancy of a hamster is just over 2 years, and
females usually become infertile at around 1 year old, then for any
particular colour line in a Hamstery you would expect to have 6 or 7
hamsters at any one time.
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Which Colour Standards should you keep?
Easy beginner Standards - so
we've been told, and which most good hamster books recommend are Golden
(++), Yellow (ToTo), Black Eyed Cream (ee) and Cinnamon (pp).
Slightly more difficult for one reason or another are White
(cdcd) and Greys (LgLg, Sgsg and dgdg), Blacks (aa) and Rust (bb).
These colours can be combined with different patterns; Banded
(Baba), Dominant Spot (Dsds) and coat types; Long Hair (ll), Satin
(Sasa) and Rex (rxrx).
When purchasing initial stock it
is
important to ensure that a Breeding Certificate or Pedigree is obtained
from the breeder, showing details of the parents and if possible the
grand-parents. Always try to buy a hamster from 'true' stock e.g.
if the hamster is a Black Eyed Cream, then parents and ideally
grand-parents should be of the same colour. For this reason it is
always advisable to buy from a breeder rather than a pet shop where the
parentage of the hamster is unknown. A hamster that looks like a
Black-Eyed Cream may be carrying another colour in it's genetic make-up!
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Show Classes for the Northern Hamster
Club are
Short Haired - Golden, Yellow, Cream, Cinnamon, White, A.O.C. (Any
Other Colour), Patterned, Satin; Long Haired - White, Cream, Patterned,
A.O.C. and Satin.
For showing purposes a reasonable
stock to carry would be Golden, Yellow, Cream, Cinnamon, White and
Black (our preference). This allows entries into a number of classes.
Ideally we like to show 2 hamsters per class. Using the
methods above
this means 36 hamsters at varying ages are needed in a Hamstery.
However our thinking at the moment is that 2 lines of golden
would be desirable as it is often advisable to breed a line back to
'pure' golden in
order to maintain good type and colour, which can be lost due to
in-breeding.
If you wanted to experiment with
producing
the other colours like Blonde (LgLgpp), Beige (bbdgdg), Honey (ppToTo),
Smoke Pearl (dgdgToTo) or Lilac (dgdgpp) then, by the correct matings
combining
2 colours within just 2 or 3 generations they could be produced.
Further
colours such as Red Eyed Ivory (dgdgeepp or LgLgeepp) and Copper
(bbeeppUU)
can be produced by combining 3 or 4 colours.
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Hamster
Genetics
Hamster genetics can be a
complicated subject that needs a great deal of study to fully
understand. Basically, genotypes can be separated into two
categories; dominant and recessive. The dominant colour genes
are: Light Grey (LgLg), Yellow (ToTo), Silver Grey (Sgsg) and Umbrous
(UU). Umbrous is a gene that darkens the overall colour and gives the
hamster a 'sooty' appearance, but it can also be combined with a colour
to produce another colour e.g. Black Eyed Cream + Umbrous = Sable
(UUee). Patterns and some coat types also tend
to be dominant i.e. Banded (BaBa) Dominant Spot (Dsds), and Satin
(Sasa).
The recessive colour genes are:
Cinnamon (pp), Rust (bb), Black Eyed Cream (ee), Black (aa), Dark Grey
(dgdg) and White (cdcd). White is epistatic to all colours, which means
that a hamster appearing to be White is in fact genetically a hamster
of another colour. Recessive coat types are Rex (rxrx) and Long Haired
(ll).
Mating to avoid include: Satin to
Satin, as double satinisation produces a hamster with a very sparse or
even a bald coat; two White, Dominant Spot or Banded hamsters if there
is the possibility that they carry the White Bellied gene (Whwh) as
this will produce Eyeless Whites. It is worth mentioning this
gene in a little more detail. The White Bellied, or Anophthalmic
gene is semi
dominant and is used to produce Roan hamsters, however if both parents
carry the gene 25% of the resultant litter will be Eyeless Whites - a
hamster that has very small or non-existent eyes. It is difficult
to establish whether a hamster carries this gene if it is Banded or
Dominant Spot as these patterns produce hamsters with white bellies as
part of the pattern. Therefore great care should be taken when
breeding two patterned hamsters together and should only be undertaken
if you are sure they do
not carry the Anophthalmic gene.
We would like to add that we are
not
by any means experts in the field of genetics, however we do feel that
we
have a reasonable understanding of the subject. However we have
had
a few suprises along the way e.g. a Silver Grey female mated to a Black
male
producing a litter of 6 Black hamsters - Paul calculated that the odds
of
this happening were 4096 : 1!! Most hamsters we have encountered
are not 'pure' as they carry other genes, so we are quite often
surprised when a litter is born. At the very least it makes
breeding hamsters fun and we have had some pleasant surprises along the
way. Our future aim is to try to produce 'pure' colours but we
realise this could take many years to achieve.
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Our First True
Golden
A true golden is a Syrian that
carries no other colour genes. Therefore to be certain of a true Golden
you have to be sure that the hamster in front of you is carrying no
recessive colour genes - sounds simple but is a lot more complicated
than it appears.
Take one recessive colour gene
e.g. Cream (e). To be certain that a Golden hamster is not carrying the
Cream gene we need to cross it with another that is homozygous in Cream
(ee), i.e. carries a double dose of the Cream gene so that it shows it.
Colours that display a double dose of the Cream gene are: Black-eyed
Cream (ee), Red-eyed Cream (eepp), Copper (UUbbeepp), Black-eyed Ivory
(dgdgee), Red-eyed Ivory (dgdgeepp), Sable (UUee), Mink (UUeepp), Blue
Mink (UUdgdgeepp). Mating the Golden hamster suspected of carrying the
recessive Cream gene to any of
these colours would produce certain proof that the Golden hamster
carries the Cream gene. In the reverse, the absence of the Cream
gene in a litter would be very strong evidence that the Golden hamster
does not carry the Cream gene. [Statistically, in a litter of 8
babies, if none of the offspring show a Cream combination the
probability of the Golden hamster
not carrying the Cream gene would be 93.75%. If there are more in
the litter then the confidence increases.]
Cream is just one of the
recessive colour
genes, so the same test needs to be done with all the recessive colour
genes
to prove that the Golden hamster in question is 'true'. In
practice this process is possible if the hamster in question is male
but for a female, considering it's shorter breeding life, this is not
practical. Therefore it is much harder to determine which recessive
colour genes are carried by a female hamster. One way to assist
in this process is to look at
the ancestry of the hamster, in this way we can determine the most
likely genes present and then try to eliminate them one by one.
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Vincent's ancestry told us that
he may
be carrying Black, Cinnamon and Dark Grey - all recessive genes.
Vincent was first mated to Wanda,
a Golden that was known to be carrying the Cream gene. The
resultant
litter produced 9 Golden babies. His second mating was to Urma, a
Melanistic (Black) Yellow. This mating produced 13 babies in a
combination
of Yellow and Golden Torte. There were both long and short-haired
babies in the litter which established that Vincent carries the
Long-haired gene (l). This mating also established that Vincent
does not carry the Black gene (a) as there were no Yellow/Black
combinations in the litter. A further mating between Wanda and
Wilbur produced a litter containing a Red-eyed Cream (eepp) which told
us that Wanda carried the Cinnamon (p) gene. This mating also
meant that due to the absence of Cinnamon in the mating between Vincent
and Wanda, Vincent does not carry the Cinnamon gene.
In this way we established that
the only gene Vincent may carry is Dark Grey (dgdg). Vincent's
genotype
could either have been ++Ll or ++DgdgLl. We then leant Vincent to
another
breeder who mated her to a Dark Grey female and the litter
consisted
of nothing but Goldens so in this way it was within reasonable
statistical
evidence that Vincent carried no recessive colour mutated genes!!!
Hence it was
statistically
acceptable to assume from his pedigree and offspring that in fact
Vincent
was a "pure golden" hamster and mating him to several females who also
carried
only one recessive gene it was possible to establish several "pure
golden"
offspring. From selective matings a group of six female and two
males
is now established with the intention of propagating a good line and
also
by further selective breeding be able to consolidate and strengthen
other
colour lines.
If you do have any questions
relating to this page we would be happy to try to answer them.
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