Hello your little cute, it's online~
How about it, can you accurately say its name in the first place?
As a worker majoring in biology and medicine, most of them should have been in contact with this guy, otherwise, the professional teacher must have talked about it. However, there are really not too many people who can really get the name right. There has also been confusion in some professional books in China.
Kick off the long river of history
In 1839, British zoologist George Robert Wathouse discovered a female mouse in Syria, named Golden Hamster (golden hamster), scientific name Cricetus auratus.
In 1930, Israel Aharoni, a zoologist and professor at the University of Jerusalem, caught a litter of wild rats on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria, in which 3 pups (1 male and 2 female) were bred and bred in captivity and purified into experimental animals, named Syrian hamster, that is, Syrian hamsters, scientific name Mesocricetus auratus, and its descendants gradually spread around the world.
Mesocricetus auratus (Syrian hamster) is larger than Cricetus auratus (golden hamster). Because they are both from Syria, scientists think they may be the same species.
The golden hamster (Syrian hamster) raised in China was brought back by Professor Lan Chunlin from the Hoopex Foundation Medical Research Institute in San Francisco in 1948, and after more than 70 years of closed breeding, it has become one of the important experimental animals for scientific research and verification in mainland China.
Golden hamster (photo by Xu Ping) Source: China Science Expo
Of course, Chinese hamsters, also known as Chinese hamsters, are also bred as experimental animals and commonly used in English Hamster (also known as the black-lined hamster, Striped hamster; Scientific name Cricetulus barabensis). The chromosomes are few and large (2n=22), most of which can be distinguished from each other and clearly located, especially the Y chromosome is unique in morphology and easy to identify. Without gallbladder, the length of the large intestine is twice as short as that of golden hamsters, but the brain weight and testicles are nearly twice as heavy as those of golden hamsters. It is often used as diabetes research and is a good animal model for true diabetes.
The predecessor of the Chinese hamster: wild black-lined hamster (quoted from Luo Zexun et al., 2000) Source: China Science Exhibition
Animal taxonomic archives
Syrian hamsters – hamsters (Cricetidae)
Subfamily Hamsters (Cricetinae)
Golden hamster (Mesocricetus)
Or the genus Middle Hamster
Golden hamsters in English
However, it is often called "Golden Gopher"!
His cousin, the Chinese hamster (also known as the black-lined hamster)
belong
The hamster subfamily Cricetulus (Rat-like hamsters) is a genus of animals native to China.
Chinese hamsters photographed by the Laboratory Animal Center of Shanxi Medical University
Kick off the long river of history again
In 1919, Chinese scholar Xie Enzeng used wild Chinese hamsters caught in the suburbs of Beijing for medical experiments.
In 1938, Zhang Changying and others began artificial breeding.
In 1948, the Americans took 10 pairs of wild stocks from northern China and brought them back to the United States, and called the cultivated experimental animals Chinese Hamster, the Chinese hamster.
However, China is often called "Chinese gopher"!
Gopher -- a "pest" that is often glorified
In the animal taxonomy system, the rodent family Muridae has the genus Nesokia, the English Short-tailed bandicoot rat. There are 2 species in the world, and the Indian gopher Nesokia indica is distributed in the east and south of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, China and the southwest of the Turpan Basin.
Don't look at the gopher in the cartoon anime so cute, but in fact they are in the same group as the rat genus (Rattus, such as brown house mouse), Bandicota and Berulmys, large in size, and one of the notorious pest rats!
Typical differences in biological characteristics
Gopher – hunk
The average weight of adult individuals is 240g, long tail, tail length 12-14cm (accounting for 2/3 of their body length), molars chewing face dentition 3 longitudinal rows, oral cavity without buccal pouch.
Hamsters – not small
The average weight of adult golden hamsters is 150g, short tail, tail length 1-3cm, body length 16-19cm, molars chewing surface dentary process 2 longitudinal, oral buccal pouch.
The average adult weight of Chinese hamsters is 25-40g, short tail, tail length 1-3cm, body length 10cm, molars masticatory surface dentition 2 longitudinal rows, oral buccal pouch.
This cheek pouch can be said to be an important feature of hamsters to distinguish them from other rodents~
Gopher lives under the basic camp, has a strong ability to gnaw plant roots, can cause surface plants to die, good at digging holes and bulldozing, resulting in desertification and wind erosion of mounds, and is very harmful to natural grasslands and artificial grasslands, and is the "most wanted criminal" of meadows, grasslands and farmland in desert and semi-desert areas!
In addition, "hamster" comes from the German word hamstern, which means to store, hoard, and is synonymous with the Chinese word "hamster".
Finally, take a look at the various hamsters that have now become human pets
Compare this fierce and vicious guy
Indian gopher (drawn by William Thomas Blanford, 1876) Source: China Science Expo
Don't get their names wrong in the future~
(Some pictures in the article come from the Internet, if they are inappropriate, please contact to delete)