5 July: Gerbil Day

Today is Gerbil Day. Here are ten things you might not know about these popular pets.

1. There are about 110 species of gerbil in the world. If you have one as a pet it will be a Mongolian gerbil or Mongolian jird (Meriones unguiculatus), a small rodent, but in the wild, there is a species of gerbil, the Great gerbil, which can grow up to 16 inches long. There are also fat-tailed gerbils, native to the northern Sahara, which have thick tails that they use for storing water.
2. Your pet gerbil will be a descendant of the 20 males and 26 females which were brought to the United States from eastern Mongolia for scientific testing in the 1950s. The scientists soon realised they made great pets. Gerbils were brought to the United Kingdom in 1964 from the United States.
3. A gerbil can jump a foot into the air. This makes them good at escaping from their enclosures but it also means you can teach them fun tricks. While they may not be quite as intelligent as Rats and Mice, they’re certainly not stupid and can be taught to navigate a maze.
4. They can also be house trained. As desert animals, they’ve evolved not to urinate very often and when they do, tend to do it in the same place in their cage. Put a small sandbox in that spot and they’ll soon start to use it like a litter tray.
5. Also as desert animals, they use sand to clean themselves. Pet gerbils need to be provided with sand for this purpose.
6. Gerbils can hear and vocalise in a wide range of frequencies. The squeaks you hear are only a tiny fraction of the vocalisations they are making to one another. This is one of the reasons scientists wanted to study them, because they may be a more suitable model of human hearing loss than mice and rats.
7. Gerbils used to be referred to as ‘desert rats’. The reason for this isn’t clear. While they do live in deserts they are not related to rats.
8. There are more than 40 gerbil coat pigmentations. Many of them are a golden colour, which would be the best camouflage in the wild, but pet gerbils have been selectively bred to come in a range of colours.
9. Gerbils’ teeth continually grow throughout their lives. In the wild, they’ll gnaw on tree bark to stop their teeth from getting too long.
10. It is illegal to purchase, import, or keep a gerbil as a pet in the U.S. states of California or Hawaii. It is also illegal to import these animals into New Zealand.

Character birthday

Reflex, a member of the Earth Guard, from the dimension of Infinitus. He defends himself with a hand held gun. While wormhole travel is likely to have given him a power of some sort, it is not yet known what that is.