Octodons.ch provies information about the following topics:
Degu keeping, cage building, nutrition
My degu outdoor enclosure
photos and backgrounds
Deguinfos online (in German)
| Degu-Ratgeber umfassende Informationen über Deguhaltung, Lebensweise in der Wildnis, Pflege, Wesen und vieles mehr. lesen |
| "Degus. Biologie · Haltung · Zucht" von Stefan Gumnior. Erschienen 2005, im Natur und Tier Verlag, Münster. 79 Seiten, € 14.80, SFr. 26.60. weitere Bücher |
Projects & Links
My degu youtube channel
large collections of small mammals videos
www.degus-international.org
Exhaustive website from Jordan Kelly
www.degupedia.de
Fachwissen für Kleinsäuger-Halter
What is a degu?
The degu (Octodon degus) is a small, 15 cm sized rodent and has a nearly equally long sized tail. It comes from Chile, South America and inhabits steppes and Mediterranean regions. It is diurnal, gregarious and its food consists of herbs, shrub leaves and seeds.
More about degus (in German): Degu-Porträt | Degu: Biologie und Haltung
Topics
Most contents actually are only available in German. However there is a growing amount of content I create for the English community. Here a short overview:
- Wood List (shrubs and trees safe for degus)
- Herb List (herbs, flowers, grasses safe for degus)
- Degu sounds
- How to dry fodder herbs?
Degu keeping in 30 seconds
- Never keep degus alone.
- Degus need at least 0,5m2 Grundfläche. Several square metres would be even better.
- Degus need fine herbs, shrub leaves, flowers and herbal seeds (bird food).
- Provide sugar and starch rich foods only in small amounts.
- Never catch degus at their tail.
- Be aware of mutuation breeds: such breeders often aren't serious.
- Have a look at pet shelters. In some regions degus are common guests here and need your help.
- Degus are passionated gnawers: Cages and free running areas have to be protected against the degus teeth.
my experience
This english section of my website is dedicated to my english speaking friends, degu owners from different countries, but also for everyone who is interested in degus and my animal keeping projects. I hope my insigths are helpful, can provide ideas for improvements in animal keeping and help to improve that we understand our animals better.
During the last years I tried out a lot of settings, alternative keeping methods and got better insight to the life of our degus. It helped me for a better understanding of their demands resulting in useful improvements in my own degu keeping. Here I give a short overview to some of my most important projects.
scientific literature. One of the most crucial things in animal keeping is scientific literature, as we can obtain a better insight how our animals live in wild. For the degus we have to good situation that there are plenty of field studies and the knowledge how our degus live in Chile is quite well. Some of the most important journals are Revista Chilena de Historia Natural and Journal of Mammalogy. This journals are available in a good scientific library or sometimes also online. In fact many degu related studies are online accessible and can be found with a common search engine or even easier with Googles scientific search engine Scholar search.
deep bedding and natural enrichment. Since about 2005 I tried out different improvements for degu keeping. One big improvement was to offer deep bedding. In classical cages it is difficult to provide much bedding, because the cage is not suitable for deep bedding layers. I solved this problems with two different approaches, with using straw piles for common cages and with an additional aquarium cage I connected with the regular degu cage. The aquarium allowed me to use deeper bedding layers and the degus were able to dig and create burrows. But keep in mind, that most beddings are not very stable so that it might be useful to use twigs, dried leaves, bark pieces or other structural elements for improving the bedding stability.
room freerunning keeping. In 2008 I offered my degus a 4,5 square metre part of my room. The degus had two cages and could live there freely for about one week. This experiment was limited to a week because I moved and gave up my old flat, but nevertheless it was a very imressive and eye opening experience showing me, that degus do better when we go new ways in degu keeping allowing them much more space and possibilities. In 2009 I had the opportunity to create an outdoor enclosure.
feeding fresh herbs. Besides improvements in degu keeping the nutrition of degus with natural stuff is one of my main interests. Our current understanding (in the year 2013) emphasises several crucial points. First the influence of digestible fibre is often neglected or wrongly understood. Often is stated that degus need a diet rich in crude fibre and low in fat, but this is misleading as it seems that degus fibre has to be digestible and makes up an important part of the degu diet and that other sorts of energy rich foods, especially starch rich foods (e.g. cereals), degus cannot deal well with them. This leads us to the second point, starch and sugars. It is often stated that sugars are bad and may cause cataracts and/or diabetes and it is neglected that commonly fed degu diets are rich in starch. While there are doubts that sugars are such a big problem, it seems that it is better to reduce sugars as well as starch and other easily digestible carbohydrates, as it seems that both may induce cataracts and other health problems in degus. In contrast oil seeds and other fatty rich seeds (e.g. nuts) seem to be a part of wild degus diet as well and degus seem to do well with a oil seed mixture enriching their herbs and leaves. Another issue is the Ca/P ratio in degu diets, because an imbalanced ratio may cause severe dental diseases. As many vegetables do not have a very good Ca/P ratio and many herbs and grasses do have a good one, it seems to stress the important of wild herbs, weeds, grasses, shrub leaves and so on. They should make up the most important part of the degu diet. I know that is not easy but it is feasable to improve a lot here as degu owners around the world show. Also an interesting question is, if degu feeding plants have to be fresh. It seems that there are some benefits from frehs plants as well as degus use fresh and dried foods complementary. Thus it seems to be a good idea offering them fresh and dried foods. In addition there is evidence that some plants have better effects on teeth wear down, when offered frehs.
About me
I live in Switzerland close to the frontier to Germany and keep degus since 1999. My texts are published in several German journals like Rodentia (Natur- und Tier-Verlag, Münster) or Mitteilungen der BAG Kleinsäuger (Schüling-Verlag, Münster). In addition I maintain the small mammals website Degupedia.de and consult English degu forums. My main interests are the flora and fauna from South Americas southern cone (Chile, Argentina), plant and nature photography, animal nutrition and ecology (herbivory, allelopathy, seed dispersal).