Ok, so I was given a female degu a little while back, and I didn't know, but she was pregnant and littered last night (ok, well I assumed when she started getting round, but I didn't know she was pregnant when I got her). I breed chinchillas, so I'm not totally unfamiliar to this all, but I have a few questions because I'm sure chinchillas differ from degus in some of these aspects...
How soon can you touch the babies?
Should they just be left alone until theyre like so many weeks old or should they be weighed everyday? I use a gram scale for the chinchillas, but I don't even know what a normal degu should weigh, much less what is a healthy baby weight...
At how many weeks are degu pups (? - I'm not sure what the babies are called) weaned from their mother?
Clover seems to be doing a good job taking care of them. I wasnt sure if I should touch them, so I've left her alone so far, but there are at least 8 babies...
The babies can be handled from day one as long as mum doesn't mind, just limited the handling to prevent too much stress for the first 3 weeks but after that as much as you want.
Degu weights vary and i would make a record chart and weigh them once a week so you can see if they are gaining like you would with a chinchilla.
Babies will be weaned from mum fully at around the 5 week mark and at 6 weeks you will need to seperate them into same sex groups to prevent any accidents as although males aren't usually active till the 6 month mark its better to be safe then sorry _________________
Congrats on the babies! What a fun surprise! I think that happens fairly often, you get a female, and a few weeks later, you get babies. _________________
They're very fun to watch, they follow their mom around and are moving around surprisingly a lot for only being like two days old.
Unfortunately, today was a sad day. We lost 5 of the 10 babies. I'm not quite sure what happened. I had them in a cage with kd pine shavings, and my degus like to dig, so I thought nothing of this even with the babies... I went to check on them and only saw 5 degus (and their mother) on top of the shavings, walking around. The other 5 were buried under 2 inches of shavings in a corner.. they were cold when I found them...
I feel so bad, I did not even think maybe I should not have had that many shavings in. I am not sure if they were buried by their mother (she buries food, so...), or if they dug there, or if she accidentally covered them with shavings, I don't know.... I feel so bad... poor things. Does this kind of thing happen often? I don't know....
Needless to say, I took quite a lot of the shavings out and cleaned the cage, now they have a lesser amount, I'll just clean more often...it looks like we have 4 boys and a girl left...
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