Chinchillas Life Cycle

Video Transcript

"The question is about the Chinchilla life cycle and it's quite interesting. The Chinchilla is a type of rodent that originated from South America and it's basically is a unique creature because of it's habitat, it likes to live in a higher elevation and things like that. But it's virtually extinct in the wild and so it's been domestically bred since early 1900s in the United States. The female is called the doe, the male is called the buck and the babies are called kits, and so generally when a doe becomes pregnant, it takes about a 111 days for the kits to be produced. They're about 1-6 kits per litter. Those kits grow pretty rapidly, they are weaned about 6-8 weeks of age. The another interesting thing about this type of rodent is their longevity. They live to be about on an average of 10 years which is unusual in a lot of rodents especially rodents like rats and hamsters and things, you may be talking about 2 1/2 to 3 years. So, they actually have quite a long life cycle. They've been known to live up to 20 years in captivity but 10 is about an average, so that's kind of unique for rodents."