Studies upon the plague situation in North China / by Wu Lien-teh [and others].

Date:
[1929?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Studies upon the plague situation in North China / by Wu Lien-teh [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    abundantly. The small hills consist of pure quicksand, and harbor numbers of small hamsters which dig their holes in the slopes of those hills. Ihe sandy surface of this region is literally covered with footsteps of these animals. These pretty small rodents lead exclusively a night life, and do not go out of their holes at day-time. (Also in captivity which they endure very easily, they become active only at mid-night; after sunrise they become quite drowsy.) Their burrows, built in the purest sandy area, are very large, containing many passages. The main passage leads to a rather big sleeping chamber, filled up almost entirely with a loose nest, wherein mites and fleas are found. This dwelling chamber is situated as a rule at the end of the passage in the deepest part of the burrow up to ] % meters from the ground while other passages branch off previously. One or two of the latter go upwards close to the surface of the ground leaving only a small bridge of sand unperforated so that * the animal when disturbed in its burrow may escape by opening the last barrier of one of these alleys. The hamsters often practised this thick upon us when we opened their burrow system¬ atically, and appeared unexpectedly elsewhere on the surface of the sand, but as they are very poor sprinters they were easily caught. The burrows have almost exclusively one exit. This species of small hamsters breed in late autumn, and we had occasion to collect small ones about 3 weeks old. Twice we found nests with new borns, one with 4, and another with 5, which had not yet opened their eyes. These animals do not keep any stores of food in the burrows, their dwelling chamber being the only enlarged space. However, we repeatedly detected in the sand some distance from their burrows some short blind-alleys containing a few seeds. These animals are voracious and curious so that we succeeded in catching them by means of pitfalls as follows: Tall empty tins were placed deep in the ground and covered carefully with sand; then around the borders of the entrance and at the bottom of the tin some kaolaing seeds were strewn. These pitfalls were mainly erected near places where abundant traces of the animals were present. When inspecting these pitfalls the next morning the kaoliang had disappeared, and in some of the falls were found the trapped hamsters. Sometimes the animals perished from cold in the pitfalls, so that we subsequently lined the'bottom of the tins with thin layers of cotton wool. The hamster travels at night away from its hole to the fields in order to collect some food, but they have not been traced to the houses of the village of Chien-Chia-Tien. As these animals were obtained so easily and in such abundant numbers in the plague infected district, numerous ectoparasites were collected by us for plague experiments in the Harbin Laboratory. Although various Manchurian hamsters (as Cricetulus Jurunculosus, Cr. triton and Cr. spec, from the Mongolian border near Manchouli) harbor many Hartonella bacillijormis and Trypanosomata in their blood, the blood of 50 hamsters of this species Cricetulus spec, proved sterile.