How many baby Tristram’s jirds are in a litter?
A Tristram’s jird (Meriones tristrami) usually gives birth to around 5 babies.
Each of those little ones spend around 24 days as a fetus before they are released into the wild. Upon birth, they weight 3 grams (0.01 lbs) and measure 1.5 cm (0′ 1″). They are a member of the Muridae family (genus: Meriones). An adult Tristram’s jird grows up to a size of 15 cm (0′ 6″).
To have a reference: Humans obviously usually have a litter size of one ;). Their babies are in the womb of their mother for 280 days (40 weeks) and reach an average size of 1.65m (5′ 5″). They weight in at 62 kg (137 lbs), which is obviously highly individual, and reach an average age of 75 years.
Meriones tristrami, known as Tristram’s jird, is a species of gerbil that lives in the Middle East. It is named after the Reverend Henry Baker Tristram who collected the first specimens. It is up to 155 mm (6.1 in) long, and lives in burrows in steppes and semi-deserts from Turkey and the Caucasus to Israel and Iran. Records from the Greek island of Kos represent the only gerbils reported from Europe, outside the former Soviet Union. It is a common, widespread species, and is not considered to be threatened.
Other animals of the family Muridae
Tristram’s jird is a member of the Muridae, as are these animals:
- Guatemalan vole weighting only 42 grams
- Buenos Aires leaf-eared mouse weighting only 42 grams
- Broad-toothed mouse with 1 babies per pregnancy
- Andean vesper mouse with 4 babies per pregnancy
- Temminck’s mouse with 3 babies per pregnancy
- Luzon montane forest mouse weighting only 34 grams
- Altiplano grass mouse weighting only 20 grams
- Montane Oldfield mouse weighting only 77 grams
- Krebs’s fat mouse with 4 babies per pregnancy
- Sloggett’s vlei rat with 1 babies per pregnancy
Animals that share a litter size with Tristram’s jird
Those animals also give birth to 5 babies at once:
- Dusky slender opossum
- Sminthopsis laniger
- Spectacled dormouse
- Kultarr
- Tundra vole
- Gansu shrew
- Paucident planigale
- Pacific jumping mouse
- Wood mouse
- Eversmann’s hamster
Animals with the same weight as a Tristram’s jird
What other animals weight around 112 grams (0.25 lbs)?
- Littledale’s whistling rat weighting 126 grams
- Gorongoza gerbil weighting 118 grams
- Crest-tailed mulgara weighting 100 grams
- Philippine tarsier weighting 116 grams
- Northern pika weighting 120 grams
- Kemp’s gerbil weighting 100 grams
- Fat sand rat weighting 102 grams
- Pygmy scaly-tailed flying squirrel weighting 100 grams
- Fraternal hill rat weighting 130 grams
- Alston’s mouse opossum weighting 132 grams