Changing the gerbils schedule

[Pim]

So this is just food for though I’m not actually planning on doing this but could you program a gerbils brain to be up when you are without the motivation of treats. Hers what I mean. If you had a controlled room where you set the light and temperature to matcha gerbils natural habitat during the day (when they normally sleep) to happen while your sleeping and the dawn and dusk hours to be when your around. I’ve thought quite a bit about this and just thought it was interesting. If anyone wants clarification on what I mean please ask and I was also wondering if anyone knows how the gerbils internal clock works.

[xjvd]

A quick google search shows theres a fair amount of research about how this works.

Light is certainly a factor to when gerbils are awake, but it really doesn't tell the whole story. In fact, gerbils might not even be crepuscular in the wild?

Using food is simply a much easier way to condition your gerbils to be awake when you are. You don't even need treats... you have to feed them their main diet at some point in the day anyway. Interesting idea, regardless.

[betty]

Hey Pim - any further research on your natural gerbil behaviour idea? Did you find a few things already out there to kick off with - or have you got plans to trial some of it yourself? I think it would be very interesting to create a sealed room for a whole lifestyle change experiment for your pets - but whether it would be worth it long term I'm not sure.

Modifying a gerbils behaviour is much easier and is done all the time - and I have plenty of examples of it working short term too.

To add to this, I have been getting more tech savvy to see what temperature and humidity looks like in my gerbil room with a 24 hours recording app (because otherwise I only know those facts when I enter the room on a standard hygrometer). Also, if you don't know the basics of everything before you make any changes, you can't say the changes were the cause of the result you get - like weight gain and loss. You can only say what the normal weight fluctations are of an animal if you have more than a years' worth of group weight data to compare to - as some weight changes are seasonal trends etc (for exmaple I have found that duprasi have huge weight fluctuations as part of their normal lives - I just haven't found out why yet?).

We also got a motion-sensor video camera too - so that if I see the results of an action that I don't know (like how does that wheel ALWAYS fall over) or I want to see general behaviours when I am not in the room. Again, building up a long period of data so that when something 'new' happens, I know that it is infact new and not something that has always happened but this is the first time I have seen it.

All very interesting when you think more long term aout what you are seeing.