Hamsters perceive and adapt to their surrounding environment primarily through sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. The world they see is blurry and mainly in black and white. They rely on their sense of smell to compensate for poor eyesight, and use their sharp hearing and touch to detect changes in the environment. Below is a breakdown of their perception across different sensory dimensions:
Sight
Vision Characteristics: Hamsters are highly nearsighted, with a visual range of only a few centimeters to a dozen centimeters. Objects beyond 30 centimeters appear as blurry light and shadow to them.
Color Perception: Hamsters are dichromats, meaning their eyes only contain two types of light-sensitive pigments. As a result, the world they see is mostly in shades of black, white, and gray—they cannot distinguish the rich array of colors like humans can.
Nocturnal Vision Ability: Despite their poor overall eyesight, hamsters are highly sensitive to light, especially in dim environments. Their eyes contain a large number of rod cells, allowing them to roughly distinguish the outlines of their surroundings and the positions of objects even in the dark.
Field of Vision: Hamsters have a relatively narrow field of vision, approximately 100-plus degrees, compared to humans’ nearly 200-degree field of vision. However, their eyes are positioned on the sides of their heads—a placement that gives them a certain advantage in peripheral vision.
Smell
Sensitivity: Hamsters have an extremely acute sense of smell. They can use it to judge the freshness of food, the gender and health status of other hamsters, and even track scent marks they leave in the environment to find their way back to their nests.
Role in Social Interaction: Female hamsters will smell male hamsters to decide whether to mate. Hamsters are very sensitive to scents, so if owners completely remove all scents when cleaning their cages, it may cause the hamsters to feel anxious.
Hearing
Hearing Range: Hamsters have excellent hearing and can detect ultrasonic sounds that are inaudible to humans, with a hearing range of 1–60 kHz.
Role in Danger Detection: Hamsters’ ears can ly capture subtle sounds in the surrounding environment—whether it’s the call of other hamsters or the movement of predators, nothing escapes their hearing. This sharp hearing allows hamsters to detect danger in a timely manner or confirm the presence of companions.
Taste and Touch
Taste Preferences: Hamsters have a strong fondness for sweet fruits like strawberries and bananas. If they taste something bitter, they will mostly spit it out.
Touch Perception: Hamsters perceive tactile stimuli through their entire body surface. Their whiskers act like antennas, detecting subtle changes in the surrounding environment and helping them move safely in the dark.