Gerbil Pics

[Silvanon]

In case anyone wants to see, I made a page for my gerbils. It includes a piccy of our new babies! ^_^

www.silvanon.com/Gerbils/index.html

[Thele]

Baby gerbils! I love how one of them is headed the opposite direction from its sibs.

[lex]

aawe...how cuute.

[Lumi]

Awwwweee adorableness.
hee I really like the picture of Snowy. XD

[kislah]

Awe, so cute ^__^

[Tiirana]

*huggles* They're so cute! *wants to huggle them all day*

[Silvanon]

^_^ They're my cute 'lil furries.

[Pega]

Hey, Silv... you might have to give me one of your babies. Seeing them makes me want to have bebbie gerbils! I'm afraid our two are getting kind of old, though... so I don't know if breeding them would be a good thing. ^^;

I still need to get a bigger cage for our rats, though... poor things are stuck in a cage that's way to small for them. ^^; *needs money* >.<;

[Silvanon]

*smiles* Yeah, if you want one/some, Pega, we can definately work something out. Hum, what gerbils do you have currently? (ages/genders/colors?) Females shouldn't be bred after they're about 2, but males can go longer.

[Silvanon]

Pega~ Hum, with your Black male and our Argent female paired you could definately get Black and Agouti babies. If your male has a hidden ruby eye gene "p", you can also get Argent and Lilac, and if both your male and our female additionally have hidden "e" that adds Nutmeg and Red Fox.

Adds: Oh, and they'd be 50% spotted and 50% solid.

(Our female is Aa CC E- GG pp spsp, and the males are Aa CC E- GG pp SPsp, in case you want to go study gerbil gentics. ^_^)

[Leafy]

;;; wow.... Silv, you just killed my brain for the rest of the day XD

Pega has ratties? Show!!!

[Old Storm SilverWolf]

Eeee! Between you and Katy ~an Aussie friend with rats and such~ I want some now... But I don't know how good it would work out as we use wood heat so the temps aren't stable. Not to mention the invisible toxins that might be too mild for it to hurt us terribley might be too much for such little fuzzbies. *pets the lil babies wispfully*
Though Herman seems ok... But he's a wild house mousie and they might be made of tougher stuff.
*puts a piece of dog treat by the bath tub for her little wild friend & sighs*
Anyway you have very cute grands. ^_6

[Silvanon]

Leafy~ *laughs* Well, don't credit me entirely. I've been making very good use of the automatic gerbil gene calculator. It's tons 'o fun! ^_^

(It's at www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/8478/gbcalc.htm in case anyone else wants to install it and play with it.)

LadyStorm ~ They are a lot of fun! ^_^ Gerbils will actually add more or less bedding to their nests to accomodate for changing temperatures, so I think they'd actually be okay, so long as they had plenty of bedding on hand to work with. Anyways, thanks! *luffs her fuzzies*

[Pega]

I'm not sure how old either of our Gerbils are... they were pretty much full grown when we got them and that was...two or three years ago, I think.

Coal is my gentle little guy... the very coloration I described for my digital Coal ^.~. Michelle's gerbil is a spotted Yellow fox, I think. He has ruby eyes and a wee little diamond on his head... hence the name Diamond. He's rather crazy and feisty, definately the more dominant of the two.

Oh, question! Do male and female gerbils get along? I guess the males would probably fight over her, huh... What kind of cage do you keep yours in? We finally got a terrarium for ours because otherwise they made so much noise/mess it was insane. XD I don't have enough money to buy a new cage, but I do have some of those hamster cages with the plastic tubes and such... just wondering if that'd be okay.

*giggles at Syra* I don't really have any pictures uploaded, and I don't have the time right now, but my Rat is a creme-ish colored hooded rat, again quite calm and sleepy, while Michelle's is a blue-grey hooded with enough crazyness for ten rats! @.@ They're the best of buds, tho. *snuggles them*

[Silvanon]

Pega~ Well, trios of mixed genders don't get along very well. Recommended pairings are a male and a female OR a pair of females OR up to three or so males. Females are the dominant gender of the species and generally don't get along well in groups of more than two individuals. Gerbils also don't do well alone. In the wild they form tight social groups, and it's been proven that keeping a gerbil alone will shorten it's life.

Females can really only breed up until they're about two, but males can produce pups throughout their lives, so you're okay there.

What holds a hamster will hold a gerbil just fine, so your old cages would work. I wouldn't recommend putting a breeding pair in them, though. They provide all sorts of weird and dangerous places for tiny-brained parents to put their pups. (I had some first-hand experience with that, so I DEFINATELY recommend an aquarium setup for a breeding pair.)

Probably the setup you'd have to go for is take both a male and a female from my litter. Pair up the female with whichever male you want to breed her with, and put them in the aquarium. Pair up the male pup with your other gerbil, and put that pair in the hamster cages. (I should mention that you could get another male from somewhere else. I'm just recommending one of mine because I'll deliver it and give it to you free. ^_^ )

You'd need to work out some sort of way to divide the cages in half for the first few days. The divider has to be sturdy so a gerbil can't get through it, but should have some way to let air get through so the two can get used to the smell of each-other. For the first day or two you switch the side they're on every few hours, so they get used to the scent of their smell mixing with the smell of the "stranger." If you don't use the split cage method, you can have some serious fights break out when you introduce a new gerbil. If you do use it, everything works fine.

I'm split cageing my two new gerbils right now. I wasn't expecting to get two tonight, so I had to make an impromptu divider. I ended up using a thick sheet of plastic I had around (Plexiglass I think it's called), cutting it to the right size to fit in the aquarium, and then drilling some screw-sized holes in it to let air through. You can get plexiglass at any local hardware or home improvement store, and as I recall it's like $5.00 or so for a sheet. Or you can just think what you have around the house that might work, like I did.

Well, hopefully I haven't scared you away, but I do want you to know what you're getting into. *wry grin* The pups won't be ready until Feb. 1st at the earliest, so you've got a bit to decide if you want to do it or not.