In September I bought three gerbils from a local pet store. The pet store worker sexed them all as male. Unfortunately, I lost one of them in January, leaving two boys remaining.

I was minding my business, sitting on my bed, when I saw something tiny moving in there. Sure enough, there’s four babies and Draco is actually a Dracess. I never noticed her getting bigger, and the only behavioral difference was them staying in their bedding tunnels for about an entire day. I decided not to disturb them, which was probably a good choice considering that’s probably when she gave birth. However this creates quite a few issues for me, because I’m not very familiar on raising gerbil babies and I don’t want my gerbils to continue to reproduce. But they’ve been together so long I don’t want to split them in to separate cages or get rid of one, that would break me up since I already lost one. I’m guessing the babies are around a week old, eyes still closed but full fur and moving pretty quickly.

From the research I did do, I’ve been taking extra care of mama Draco, giving her plenty of food and water and even some peanut butter gerbil treats. I haven’t touched the babies with my bare hands and they’ve kept them covered up in their bedding tunnel. I don’t want to destroy their little nest for their babies but I also want to be able to check on them.

Any advice and tips would be greatly appreciated, and please be gentle. I know gerbils are notoriously hard to sex, but since they’ve been with us for 9 months now, I figured they’d nailed the sexing. Is there any reason they’d wait so long before reproducing?