Degu

🌍 Overview

Degus are diurnal rodents from central Chile, and almost everything unusual about them follows from that. They are awake when their owners are, which is rare in a small pet, and they are intensely social, living in wild burrow colonies of up to a hundred animals with cooperative digging and sentry behavior. They are also one of the very few mammals that cannot process dietary sugar properly: degus lack a functional insulin response and develop diabetes and cataracts on fruit, so a diet that would be a treat for a hamster is genuinely dangerous here. Their teeth are open-rooted and grow for life, and the enamel turns orange with age in a healthy animal.

📋 Quick Facts

📜 History

Juan Ignacio Molina described the animal in 1782 and filed it as a squirrel, Sciurus degus; Waterhouse moved it into Octodon in 1848. Laboratory and pet degus in North America trace to one collection in 1964, when a farmer trapped 20 of them about 20 miles outside Santiago for a scientist at MIT. That colony reached 87 animals before MIT handed it to David Boraker at the University of Vermont in 1970, where it grew to some 900 head, funded partly by the National Eye Institute for cataract work, and by 1978 Vermont had supplied more than 30 US research institutions. In 2022 Patricia Cogram and colleagues showed how far separate colonies had drifted through inbreeding, which explained years of contradictory findings.

🧠 Test Yourself