49 Fun Facts About Hamster

Hamsters belong to which rodent subfamily?

Cricetinae sits in the family Cricetidae beside the voles and lemmings, which makes a hamster closer kin to a vole than to a gerbil or a rat, both of them in Muridae.

Wild hamsters are native to which part of the world?

Europe and Asia hold every wild hamster, from Belgian farm fields east to Siberia and Korea, so each pet hamster in the Americas descends from animals that were shipped in.

The word 'hamster' comes from German, where the verb 'hamstern' means what?

To hoard is the sense German gave the verb, after the animal's habit of cramming food into its cheeks, and a bout of panic buying there is a Hamsterkauf, a hamster purchase.

A hamster's cheek pouches extend back as far as which part of its body?

Its shoulders mark the back end of pouches roomy enough that some mother hamsters tuck their pups inside to carry them away from danger.

The golden hamster's name in the Arabic dialect where it was found roughly translates as what?

Mister saddlebags, the usual English rendering of the local nickname, points at the cheek pouches, which bulge like a pack animal's panniers once they are loaded with grain.

Which US state bans pet hamsters outright, along with gerbils, ferrets and snakes?

Hawaii lists hamsters among its prohibited animals because escaped pets could threaten the islands' unique wildlife and farms, and fines for keeping illegal animals run as high as $200,000.

Pet Syrian hamsters trace back to animals caught in 1930 near which city?

Aleppo anchors the species' tiny wild range: when biologists went back in 1997 and 1999 they caught just 13 hamsters, most of them burrowed into farmers' fields rather than wild steppe.

Hamster characters fronted a long-running series of US TV ads for which boxy car?

The Kia Soul hamsters first cruised past rivals plodding along on hamster wheels, and the agency David&Goliath kept bringing them back, later adding a runaway baby named Turbo.

Pet and laboratory Syrian hamsters worldwide are believed to descend from what?

A single brother–sister pairing is the popular telling, though some accounts count three littermates; either way, mitochondrial DNA ties every domestic golden hamster tested to one mother.

Hamsters bred at a Jerusalem university in 1930 were first sent abroad the next year to which country?

Britain got them in 1931, when parasitologist Saul Adler passed animals from the Jerusalem colony to London researchers; the London Zoo had pairs by 1932 and private breeders by 1937.

Wild golden hamsters live in arid northern Syria and which neighbouring country?

Turkey's southern edge and the Syrian plateau next door are the whole wild range, and farmers there poison the hamsters as crop pests while their descendants are pampered as pets around the world.

In golden hamsters, which sex is usually larger?

Females are usually the larger sex, and they act like it: once mating is over, a female will turn on the male and drive him out of her territory.

Golden hamsters hold which record among placental mammals?

The shortest pregnancy: a golden hamster carries her litter for about 16 days, and her daughters can breed at around a month old, which is why a litter is split by sex within weeks.

Golden hamsters mark their burrows using scent glands located where on the body?

On the hips sit the flank glands, which a hamster rubs along surfaces to leave a scent that tells others who lives there and even whether they are kin.

Why should adult Syrian hamsters be housed alone?

They fight, sometimes fatally, because the species is a loner by nature: when biologists mapped wild burrows in Syria, not one held more than a single adult.

How long do Syrian hamsters typically live in captivity?

2–3 years is the usual span for a Syrian, short enough that vets count a hamster as elderly from about 18 months.

Which term describes an animal, like many hamsters, that is most active at dawn and dusk?

It is why a pet hamster is usually asleep all day and rattling its wheel at 11 pm.

Which best describes a hamster's eyesight?

Nearsighted and colourblind, a hamster steers mostly by smell and whiskers and judges distance badly, which is why one will walk straight off the edge of a table.

What is notable about a hamster's front teeth?

They never stop growing, so a hamster has to gnaw to grind its incisors down; with nothing hard to chew they overgrow, and a vet may need to trim them.

What name is given to the cold, motionless state a pet hamster can slip into in a chilly room?

Torpor is a brief cousin of hibernation that a cold room can set off; it usually lasts only hours or a few days, and a hamster deep in it is easily mistaken for dead.

Like rabbits, hamsters do what to recover nutrients their gut missed the first time?

Eat their own droppings: a hamster breaks food down in its hindgut, too far along for the goodness to be absorbed, so a second pass collects it and vets regard the habit as natural.

The entrance to a wild golden hamster's burrow runs which way?

Straight down: each burrow began with a single vertical shaft, nicknamed a gravity pipe, that dropped to a nest chamber and a food chamber, and caged hamsters given deep bedding still dig with vigour.

Which robotic toy hamsters were the must-have Christmas present of 2009?

ZhuZhu Pets cost about $9 each, but shops sold out of every shipment within hours that winter, and the little motorised hamsters were soon being resold online for several times the price.

Which British cartoon secret agent has a timid, bespectacled hamster named Penfold as his sidekick?

Danger Mouse's assistant is often taken for a mole, but co-creator Brian Cosgrove meant Penfold as a hamster, and only later noticed that he had drawn a caricature of his own brother.

The tiny Roborovski hamster is native to which kind of wild habitat?

Sandy deserts of central Asia are home: it digs its burrow into the side of a dune, loose sand soon hides the entrance, and it gets by where water is scarce.

The Roborovski hamster is named after an explorer of which nationality?

Russian army officer Vsevolod Roborovsky collected the first specimen while exploring central Asia, and he gathered so much there that a rosefinch and a fern carry his name as well.

What triggers the winter white dwarf hamster's coat to turn almost entirely white?

Shortening day length is the cue, not cold: laboratory hamsters switched to short days moult to white on schedule, while pets living under house lights often stay dark all winter.

By what other name is the winter white dwarf hamster commonly known?

Djungarian comes from Dzungaria, the Asian region the species was named for, which its Latin name sungorus records too.

Peter Simon Pallas first described the winter white in 1773 as what kind of animal?

A mouse, on paper: Pallas named it Mus sungorus, but Mus was then a catch-all for small rodents, and Linnaeus had filed the common hamster there too, as Mus cricetus.

Of the five hamster species commonly kept as pets, which two can interbreed and produce live young?

Campbell's and winter white dwarfs are close enough kin to cross, though not cleanly: hybrid pregnancies are prone to badly overgrown placentas, and the young can carry health and fertility problems.

In 2000, Campbell's dwarf hamster fathers became the first male mammals recorded doing what?

Helping deliver their pups: the fathers pulled newborns from the birth canal, licked them clean and ate the afterbirth, then stayed on to share the care with the mother.

Which city ordered about 2,000 hamsters and other small pets culled in 2022 after a pet shop Covid outbreak?

Hong Kong ordered the cull under its zero-Covid policy after a pet shop worker and some of the shop's hamsters tested positive, raising fears the animals could pass the virus to people.

Wild Chinese hamsters first entered medical labs around 1919 to help doctors study which disease?

Pneumonia: a doctor in China used wild-caught hamsters to study its bacteria, but the animals would not breed in captivity, which kept the species scarce in laboratories for decades.

Which trait made the Chinese hamster a favourite of early genetics labs?

Few, large chromosomes: it has only 22, and each is big enough to tell apart easily under a microscope, which suited the early study of genes in cultured cells.

What does CHO stand for in the cell line used to make most biotech drugs?

Chinese hamster ovary cells grow densely in steel vats and finish proteins much as human cells do, which is why six of the ten best-selling drugs of 2019 were made in them.

Which Top Gear presenter did his co-hosts nickname 'the Hamster'?

Richard Hammond got the name for his small stature; when he crashed a jet car at close to 300 mph in 2006, a co-host said the team looked forward to 'getting our hamster back'.

What colour is the belly of the wild European hamster?

Black: the dark underside gives Europe's wild hamster its other name, the black-bellied hamster, and a cornered animal rears onto its hind legs to flash it at an attacker.

What IUCN Red List status was the European hamster given in 2020?

Critically endangered: once common enough to be trapped as a farm pest from France to Russia, it has crashed across its whole range, and nobody fully understands why.

A significant urban population of European hamsters lives in the central cemetery of which city?

Vienna's Central Cemetery is home to the hamsters as well as the graves of Beethoven and Brahms; a species long trapped as a farm pest has found a refuge among the headstones.

When scientists left hamster-style running wheels out in the wild, what did free-living mice do?

Ran on them by choice: wild mice made most of the filmed runs and even frogs took a turn, which suggests wheel running is no mere nervous habit of caged animals.

Offered a choice of wheels in a lab test, which did Syrian hamsters clearly prefer?

The largest wheel won easily, 35 cm across against 23 cm, and the researchers concluded that pet hamsters would be better off with wheels of the size usually made for rats.

In the English-language version of Hamtaro, the title hamster is owned by a girl named what?

Laura Haruna is a fifth-grader whose pet does the looking after: Hamtaro heads out on adventures with a gang of fellow hamsters, and they keep stepping in to get her out of trouble.

In 2020, protesters in which country sang a reworded Hamtaro theme song to mock their government?

Thailand's student protesters changed 'the most delicious food is sunflower seeds' to 'taxpayers' money' and ran in circles like hamsters on a wheel, demanding that parliament be dissolved.

The Hampster Dance tune is a sped-up sample from which Disney film's soundtrack?

Robin Hood's rooster minstrel sings Roger Miller's 'Whistle-Stop'; sped up and looped, the tune carried the web page, and the 2000 novelty single built on it went to number one in Canada.

The Hampster Dance page was named after creator Deidre LaCarte's own pet hamster, called what?

Hampton fronted a throwaway GeoCities page that LaCarte built to beat her sister and a friend in a web-traffic contest; it had drawn only about 800 visits before it suddenly went viral in 1999.

'Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster' was a 1986 front-page headline in which British newspaper?

The Sun splashed the tale of a hamster eaten in a sandwich, a practical joke cooked up with Starr's agent, Max Clifford; Starr later wrote that he had never so much as nibbled any small mammal.

Rhino, the fearless hamster who rolls around in a plastic ball, appears in which 2008 Disney film?

Bolt's hamster is voiced by Disney story artist Mark Walton, who volunteered a rough stand-in recording during production that was so funny the directors simply kept it.

In the bestselling 'According to Humphrey' children's books, where does Humphrey the hamster live?

A school classroom: Humphrey is the class pet of Room 26 at Longfellow School, and across Betty Birney's series the small hamster quietly sorts out the problems of the children around him.

On the steppes of northern Manchuria, Campbell's dwarf hamsters sometimes share burrows with which small mammal?

The pika, a short-eared relative of the rabbit, sometimes shares its burrows with these hamsters; on the Mongolian plateau they skip digging altogether and move in with jirds instead.