Whitmoregirl's Wombles

I love watching my young’uns when they playfight, it’s so endearing to see them wrestle and box with one another, and ping around their tank looking for another playmate when one runs off!

This is a photo of Pandora and Izzie getting sprightly whilst having playtime!

And I also managed to get a video of them getting bolshy to one another!

Play fighting isn’t all just for fun though; this is how young gerbils establish their pecking order. By watching your gerbils play-fight as pups, and later on, seeing how they interact together when sleeping, grooming etc, you get to know who the dominant male or female in the group is.

Adults will also occasionally play fight but this isn’t as common as pups playing. Never confuse your gerbils fighting for play when it may be serious! A play fight will be easy to interrupt, and often involves the gerbils grooming one another in between boxing bouts, whilst during a serious fight the gerbils will completely ignore you and may bite you in confusion if you attempt to intervene. This is why we always encourage owners to wear or to have handy some thick gloves when introducing gerbils or breaking up a ball fight.

There is a video of a ball fight, as well as more play fighting videos, on eGerbil’s behaviour page.

Sometimes you will find that the offspring of two animals are larger and healthier than their parents. The reason behind this is called ‘hybrid vigour’, also known as ‘heterosis’.
Basically, it’s when the offspring are seen to be ‘superior’ to their parents. If the opposite happens and the hybrid inherits traits from their parents that makes them unfit to survive, the result is referred to as outbreeding depression.

Here’s one example of hybrid vigour…

Gracie (55g) X Kipp (90g) = Delu (120g)!

Just so you can see the size difference between mother and daughter..

That’s one hell of a big difference in one generation!

I find that a lot of gerbil owners are confused to what purpose the white markings on their self (coloured belly) gerbils serve.

Well, they don’t serve a purpose per se, but for breeding they do serve a very useful indicator of what kind of spotting patterns you may get should it be bred to a spotted gerbil. *

* Just to clarify, pale and white gerbils and white bellied gerbils do carry these markings, but because of the white on their paws and bellies, you obviously cannot see them, it’s only because of the coloured belly on ‘aa’ types that you can see them.

The spotting in gerbils is unlike most other species, whose spotting is recessive. Gerbil spotting is called Dominant Spotting because it is dominant!, meaning that if the gene is in the animal, it’s characteristics will always appear in the phenotype (ie what the animal’s physical appearance).

Spotting is odd in gerbils, in that there doesn’t seem to be any equivalent recessive at that loci, a gerbil either has it or doesn’t, so if you breed from a spotted gerbil, on conception the embyro is either spotted or it isn’t.
Dominant spotting causes a very mild form of anaemia in gerbils. Embryos with two copies of the gene (SpSp) tend to die before birth because of very severe anaemia; in some extremely rare occasions, some of these pups have came to full term but are either still-born on birth or die shortly after, although this is exceptionally rare and more often the embryo will die in the womb and is simply reabsorbed and replaced.

Because this usually happens so early in the pregnancy, and gerbils produce more embryos than can implant anyway, the number of pups in the litter is not affected. There is a page going into more detail on this on eGerbil, Spotted gerbil litters, which is worth a read
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