lost gerbil friend

[kitt13]

Hi, i recently acquired 2 female gerbils, about a week and a half ago. well one of them sadly died last night and i heard from a friend that gerbils will die of loneliness. right now i have her in my guinea pig cage (2 young males) and they seem to get along just fine ( iv introduced them before). so what my two questions are. is it true she cannot live alone and will die of loneliness. and is it ok for her to live in the guinea pige cage for company?

[crittercrazy]

Sorry to hear about your gerbil!
Its not necessarily true that she will die of loneliness. She may become 'depressed', which may lead to sickness, and that could cause death. Its not that likely though.
However, she is very likely to be lonely and unhappy, so getting her a new friend would be a good idea.

That said, I'm not sure guinea pigs are suitable as a friend. I don't have experience with this, but from what I've read its risky- they're likely to fight, and a guinea pig (let alone two) could hurt a gerbil quite badly.
Also, their diets are so different that problems would arise with that.
Someone else who knows more about guinea pigs might have something better to offer, I'm just going off of research.

[kitt13]

thanks for the advice crittercrazy. i will try and get her a new friend but thats not easy where i live there are literally no pet stores lol small town. shes been with the guinea pigs for 12 hours now and they seem to like it the gp are hopping in excitement and not aggressive towards her in any way but i will keep watch very carefully,i set up a second, higher level in the cage so she has somewhere to go and so i can sepertate the food

[catnut]

I wouldn't put a guinea pig and gerbil together, you could maybe put their cages close together so they could see each other but keeping them overnight would be a bad idea.

[redsky]

While there have been exceptional cases where gerbils have bonded with a rat or similar it is far from advisable. The biggest thing for me if they appear to not be aggressive with each other is that they are still different animals and have very different ways of communicating. It would be like keeping a person with only cats for companions. Yeah it's nice, you can form a bond but you can't talk to them and do similar activities together. If your gerbil is young I would definitely get another. Have a look at the section on split cages as this is the safest way to introduce two gerbils together.
Also you have a problem that they need different set-ups, gerbils need deep substrate to dig in, ideally a tank or a bin cage with at a very minimum 8" of substrate. For my three gerbils I bought this tub
www.therange.co.uk/160l-plastic-storage-box-clear/storage/The-Range/fcp-product/49246
and then we built a topper to go over it so the tub (just short of 24") is full of a mixture of substrates and boxes. 2 of my gerbils passed away (one unexpectedly, one from cancer and PTS) so I just have one female in there. Since she's older and is coping well on her own we have made the hard decision to leave her as she is, I think at her age the stress of introducing pups will be too much and she wouldn't have long with them (plus we don't want the never ending cycle of gerbils). Lots of toys, lots of time out of the cage and lots of attention from us, not as good as having a gerbil friend but maybe the best for her and us at this point. If her sisters passed away while she was much younger we wouldn't have hesitated, we would have introduced new friends.