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Thread: Chinchillas and other small things

  1. #21
    Erik.'s Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by zypiris View Post
    Always great to have some more rodent fans, even after the sucky parts come up. No matter what kind of fuzzy, feathery, or scaly you have, they always leave too soon. I'm just happy that rats are pretty easy to breed and maintain. If you want, you can have a little piece around forever. I kept the line from my first rat going the full 7 years. None of them were her, but... such is life. If everything stayed around forever, we'd never appreciate any of it.
    But on the subject of life, I wanted to highlight a birth recently of a rather obscure and little known rat cousin. The mouse deer!
    (you need an account to see links)

    This little bebe was born recently at the Bristol Zoo in England, and has been too shy so far for the keepers to figure out its gender. Mouse deer at full height are about as tall as a pencil (8 inches/20 cms). They keep to themselves, and are native to South Asia (with a single related species clustered in Africa). They don't do the horn/antler thing that most other deer do, but they secretly have vampire teeth! Their fancy name, Chevrotain, is based on the old French word for goat.

    Now, some of you might be unconvinced of the rodent-y nature of the tiny, tiny mouse deer, but just look at the name. I mean, deer have horns and no vampire teeth, so obviously these deer are not deer at all. Think of deer mice, another misleadingly labeled species.
    In conclusion, I hope everyone had fun meeting the (very distant) rodent cousin and has a good day.
    Aww they remind me a bit of African Dik-diks and Indonesian Kantjils.

    Edit: was gonna put a pic of both in my post but Kantjils are the same as Chevrotains apparently, TIL! Here's a pic of a dik-dik though:




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    Nattiee (04-26-2021),SpongeBob (04-26-2021),Zapdos (05-03-2021),zypiris (04-26-2021)

  3. #22
    zypiris's Avatar
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    Thank you for the extra learning, 20 characters long. They do look like dik diks, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were much closer cousins. If this keeps up, we'll map out an entire furry family tree. Something to think about in the future.

    Random fact time. Chinchilla girls are bigger than boys, which you may or may not remember from an earlier fact time, and we talked about pregnancy a bit earlier. But how do you tell if the little fuzzballs are pregnant? If they weren't so fuzzy, you could watch them get fatter.... But that just does not work with chinchillas. You could feel their belly for bebes, but that's not 100% even with twins. Single bebes are still very hard to feel, and mom would rather not be poked, thank you. They're generally grumpy and always weird, so the behaviour doesn't change.

    What do you think? Guessing time! High five and a chinchilla baby pic to anyone who can guess. I'll answer tomorrow if no one's gotten it. (If you google the answer, at least let everyone have fun guessing first.)

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    Erik. (04-27-2021)

  5. #23
    zypiris's Avatar
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    So, tomorrow turned out to be more...next week shaped than first expected. I've been eaten by my new discord server. But enough about that. Ya'll come here for cute pictures and weird facts, so to start out right (and make up for the delay)..
    (you need an account to see links)

    Alright! On to the question of the week. How do you tell if a chinchilla is pregnant? You can't see them getting fatter, and it's hard to feel a difference in their Pikachu-like bodies. The answer is with science! *dramatic lightning*
    Chinchilla breeders regularly weigh all their fuzzy children, roughly once a week. It's hard to tell what's going on with them, so a noticeable drop in weight can tell you that someone isn't feeling good. Or a sudden rise in weight can tell you that she's pregnant.
    Boys are about 450 grams, and girls get up to around 5-600 grams. They'll also gain another 50-75 grams total over their pregnancies. (Grams get used because of how small the little alien rabbit things are. Between the gram scale and all the dust, you look like a drug dealer.)

    (you need an account to see links)

    And there you have it. Sorry it's so short today, but life continues ^.^'
    P.S. You can put chins and cats together, but you'll want to have a tolerant cat who was preferably raised with small fuzzy animals. Cats just have to chase small, running things, and chinchillas like to run and bite when scared. Rubbing a cloth on one which you leave near the other can help both get them used to each other (which will work with any scent based pet. Get your dog ready for the new baby/cat/boyfriend!)

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    My name is Yoshikage Kira (05-03-2021),Zapdos (05-03-2021)

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