Endangered
Golden hamster
Mesocricetus auratus
Their natural geographical range is in an arid region of northern Syria and southern Turkey.
The rodent
Adult golden hamsters can reach around 7.1 in (18 cm) long.
Range and habitat
Their natural geographical range is in an arid region of northern Syria and southern Turkey. Their numbers have been declining in the wild due to a loss of habitat from agriculture and deliberate elimination by humans.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
A solitary species, Syrian hamsters are very territorial and intolerant of each other. Attacks against each other are commonplace. In captivity, they may kill and eat healthy young as a result of the pups interacting with humans, as any foreign scent is treated as a threat.
Females also eat their dead young in the wild. Female Syrian hamsters show mate preference before they engage in copulation by displaying vaginal marking, known to solicit males.
In crisis
Thus, wild golden hamsters are now considered endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Major concerns include undersized cages, the presence of predatory species (dogs and cats) in the hamster's environment, insufficient substrate depth, excessive handling, noise, and wet tail (proliferative ileitis), the risk of that is increased by poor hygiene and cage cleanliness and high levels of stress.
Golden hamster is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Golden hamster, Wikidata item Q204175. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
