Hamster Vacuum

That's hilarious. I suppose it has to spit the food out later in order to be able to chew it up?

When I saw the post title I couldn't help thinking to myself, gee, that's kind of out of character for GrrlScientist to think that vacuuming up hamsters would be funny...

yes, the hamster has to spit out the collected food from its cheek pouches before they can eat it. but hamsters are so good at collecting seeds that, back in the good old days, the local farmers would raid their nests to recover some of their lost harvests. well -- that's what i read when i was a kid, so i can't be sure if it's really true.

I kept pet hamsters in high school and college, though I can no longer have them at home, since I now work on other rodents (mice) in the lab, and there's always the potential to inadvertently transfer diseases (though many people ignore that fact). My sister and I had two cream-colored "teddy bear" hamsters, and they loved Cheerios. They would stuff their pouches so full that they couldn't enter and crawl through their Habitrail tubes, to get to the "stash" compartment. It's fun to watch them push on the sides of their cheeks to empty the pouches, too.

It's the European common hamster whose burrows farmers would raid for stored grain. Since much of the grain came from the farmers' fields in the first place, this was more like stealing it back. I think this species is still considered an agricultural pest.

The pet hamster is actually the Syrian golden, which is very rare in the wild.

I have this image of hamsters used like the Asian fishermen's cormorants: leashed with fishing line, turned out onto harvested fields to glean every last grain, and reeled back in when their cheeks were stuffed.