Hamster Species and History
Although there are about twenty-four known species of hamster, today, there are five main species of hamster found as pets and laboratory animals.
Originally, hamsters found their way in to captivity because they were found to be susceptible to a particular disease (kala-azar) that Chinese medical researchers were studying in the 1920s. The Chinese hamster became the first laboratory animal to readily. Chinese researchers would pay farmers for each hamster they dug up in their fields, and a plentiful supply was established. However, despite numerous attempts, reseachers were unable to breed the Chinese hamster, due mainly to its highly contentious nature when it comes to territory - introducing two such hamsters in the same cage often led to a fight to the death.
In the 1930s, a naturalist in Syria unearthed a burrow of Syrian hamsters and the mother and litter were taken to a researcher at Hebrew University in Jerusalem where the line continued to breed in captivity. They bred profilcally and within a year had produced more than 300 Syrian hamsters in the first laboratory colony.
Until the early 1970s, all hamsters in captivity were descendents of this first litter captured in the 1930s. However, in 1971, a researcher in Aleppo, Syria caught 12 Syrian hamsters and took them to the United States where they were successfully bred in to the existing line.
Although the Syrian hamster is the principal full hamster raised in captivity, by the 1950s, four species of dwarf hamster were also successfully bred in captivity. These dwarf hamsters are not merely miniatures of the larger, commonly kept Syrian hamster, but are in fact distinct species. The four species of dwarf hamster are: Campbell's Russian hamster (sometimes called the striped hamster), Roborovskii's hamster (sometimes called the desert hamster), the Chinese hamster (also sometimes called the striped hamster) and the Winter White hamster (also called the Siberian hamster).
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