Given that the collection of wild Golden Hamsters that led to all individuals in labs, zoos and homes being derived from one female was in 1930, it is not surprising that attempts have been made to obtain more from the wild in order to test for any signs of inbreeding or domestication.
Since 1930 there have been two successful attempts to capture, maintain and breed Golden Hamsters. There ahe also been other reports between 1949 and 1986. However, the numbers were very small and breeding attempts, if made, were unsuccessful.
Michael Ross Murphy (1971) and William Duncan (1978)
 |
| Michael Murphy with a newly-caught hamster in 1971. This is a photograph used to illustrate Murphy's 1985 paper. This colour version is from his obituary online. |
The first successful collection and then breeding was in 1971 by the man who wrote the history of the hamster in 1985—the late Michael Ross Murphy. This is what he wrote:
When I started working with Syrian hamsters in 1967, there had been until then only three documented captures of wild hamsters in history—one before 1781, one around 1839 and one in 1930. Also, all domesticated golden hamsters were descendants of the three sibling survivors of Aharoni's ten orphans. So, to satisfy my own curiosity and obtain wild hamsters for comparative research…my wife, Janet, and I made a reconnaissance expedition to Aleppo, Syria, in May/June, 1971… In all, 13 wild hamsters were captured and 12 of them (four males and eight females) were brought back to the United States…Descendants of the animals I captured in Syria are being maintained by Andrew Lewis, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. In 1978, Bill Duncan, Southwestern Medical School, Dallas, Texas, made the historically third capture of live wild hamsters, returning two females to the United States.
Michael Murphy who died last year at the age of 73 was a psychologist and the footnote* is extracted from an obituary posted online by an undertaker in San Antonio, Texas.
I have found papers describing work on these wild hamsters, the first by Murphy himself on how males and females discriminate between potential mates of their own or closely-related species. Other papers used these hamsters for studies on amyloid protein. Bill Duncan, to whom Murphy referred, used ‘recently-wild’ and classical inbred strains in immunological research. However, after the early 1980s I have seen no further reference and I do not know if animals bred from the animals Murphy and Duncan collected have been maintained as a pure line at NIH or elsewhere. Nor do I know if any of the offspring of these wild animals or their crosses with the old inbred stock went to private collectors, the pet trade or zoos.
Rolf Gattermann (1999)
 |
| Rolf Gattermann with Golden Hamster |
In 1999 the late Rolf Gattermann (1949-2006) with colleagues from the University of Halle in Germany and collaborators from the University of Aleppo, caught another group of Golden Hamsters and studied their habitat and burrows. In all 22 hamsters (19 from the expedition and 3 from the University of Aleppo) were taken back to Germany to form a new breeding stock for behavioural and genetic studies.
With all hamsters before 1999 being descended from a single mother there were two questions everybody was asking: was there inbreeding depression or changes in morphology and physiology as a result of domestication. The availability of new hamsters from the wild allowed these questions to be answered by Gattermann’s group. In their words:
There is evidence that genetic variation among lab and wild hamsters has only minor consequences on parameters such as body mass, body measurements, organ weights and behaviour.
However, the reproductive success of original laboratory male hamsters was lower than that of wild-derived males when tested with both types of female. no matter the genetic history of the mother, the litter size was markedly lower with a lab male as the father compared with a wild father. The physiological mechanism involved remains unknown.
After Rolf Gattermann’s death from cancer in 2006 at the age of 57, his team of collaborators, who had made Halle a centre of small rodent research, continued publishing their work and started new strands, including field work on the Golden Hamster in southern Turkey. One interesting paper, begun while Gattermann was still alive, reported that while in the laboratory male and female hamsters (whether derived from old line or from newly-caught individuals) are nocturnal, in the wild female hamsters are diurnal. They speculated that a balance in the environment whereby nocturnal predators (owls and foxes) are a more potent threat than diurnal ones (birds-of-prey and snakes) may be responsible:
Our observations indicate that the control of activity rhythms in hamsters is much more complex and more sensitive to environmental factors than previously realized, thus suggesting new questions for investigation. We do not know how hamster activity patterns vary throughout the year, but our findings raise the question of whether the activity patterns described in laboratories ever occur in nature.
The Halle group have recently published a book on the Golden Hamster in German†; this seems to be an updated version of a book written by Kittel in 1986 but it has not yet appeared at booksellers.
If one compares the recent distribution map of the Golden Hamster with the maps appearing almost daily that show the conflict in northern Syria, it becomes instantly obvious why any field work on that species has become impossible in recent years.
 |
| Current distribution of the Golden Hamster as deduced by Gattermann and his colleagues in 2001 |
 |
| Michael Murphy in later life |
*Dr. Murphy earned a B.A in Psychology from Occidental College in 1967 and received his Ph.D. in Psychology and Brain Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. He did post-doctoral work as a Fellow of the Smithsonian Institution, and as a Staff Fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health (1972-1982). He conducted field research in Syria, Israel, and Romania. His field trip to Syria in 1971 with his wife resulted in the historic first successful capture of wild hamsters since the first specimens were captured in 1940. Dr. Murphy was the world's foremost expert on hamsters, important in medical research. At this time, he jokingly called himself a neuroosphreseolagnomesocricetologist, one who studies the brain structures for olfaction and natural behavior in hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus). Two of his many publications were important cover articles in the journal Science… In 1982 Dr. Murphy began his career working on medical protection for chemical weapons toxicity for the Air Force in San Antonio, first as contractor/manager with Systems Research Laboratories and later with the US government. He joined the US Air Force Research Laboratory in 1989 and was Chief of the Radio Frequency Radiation Branch from 1994-2004 and directly contributed to studies on the biological effects of millimeter waves and high peak power pulses. Dr. Murphy became the Scientific Director, Directed Energy Bioeffects Division, where he championed the importance of bioeffects research for supporting military applications of directed energy and non-lethal weapons. His work enabled weapons design, optimal safe Test and Evaluation, threat assessment, exposure standards, medical preparedness, protection, and policy decisions. It was through his efforts that the US Air Force is recognized internationally as a world-class center for radio frequency radiation health and safety research and dosimetry; he emphasized the critical importance of research quality and science-based decisions…
†Der Goldhamster by Rolf Gattermann, Peter Fritzsche and Karsten Neumann. VerlagsKG Wolf. 2019
Fritzsche P, Neumann K, Nasdal K, Gattermann R. 2006. Differences in reproductive success between laboratory and wild-derived golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) as a consequence of inbreeding. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 60, 220-226.
Gattermann R, Fritzsche P, Neumann K, Al-Hussein I, Kayser A., Abiad M, Yakti R. 2001. Notes on the current distribution and the ecology of wild golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus). Journal of Zoology 254, 359-365.
Larimer SC, Fritzsche P, Song Z, Johnston J, Neumann K, Gattermann R, McPhee ME, Johnston RE. 2011. Foraging behavior of golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) in the wild. Journal of Ethology DOI: 10.1007/s10164-010-0255-8
Gattermann R, Fritzsche P, Weinandy R, Neumann K. 2002. Comparative studies of body mass, body measurements and organ weights of wild-derived and laboratory golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus). Laboratory Animals 36, 445-454
Gattermann R, Johnston RE, Yigit N, Fritzsche P, Larimer S, Ozkurt S, Neumann K, Song Z,
Colak E, Johnston J, McPhee ME. 2008. Golden hamsters are nocturnal in captivity but diurnal in nature. Biology Letters 4, 253-255.
Murphy, M.R. 1985. History of the capture and domestication of the Syrian Golden Hamster (Mesocricetus auratus Waterhouse). In, The Hamster. Reproduction and Behavior. Edited by HI Siegel. New York: Plenum Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment