Corn turning French hamsters into deranged cannibals.

A new research has shown that corn turning French hamsters into deranged cannibals.A diet of corn is turning wild hamsters in northeastern France into deranged cannibals that devour their offspring, there is an imbalance, and the hamster habitat is collapsing. The findings, reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, finger industrial-scale monoculture as the culprit. Once nourished by a variety of grains, roots and insects, the burrowing rodents live today in a semi-sterile and unbroken ocean of industrially grown maize, or corn. The monotonous diet is leaving the animals starving, the problem is a lack of vitamins especially vitamin B3, or niacin. According to the report, A first set of lab experiments with wild specimens compared wheat and corn-based diets, with side dishes of clover or worms. There was virtually no difference in the number of pups born, or the basic nutritional value of the different menus.,but when it came to survival rates, the difference was dramatic. About four-fifths of the pups born of mothers feasting on wheat-and-clover or wheat-and-worms were weaned. while only 5% , of the baby hamsters whose mothers ate corn instead of wheat stayed alive that long. These females stored their pups with their hoards of maize before eating them, and Pups were still alive at that time. The cannibal mothers showed other signs of abnormality,such as climbing,running in circles and pounding their feeders. The females also had swollen and dark tongues, and blood so thick it was difficult to draw for samples. Vitamin B3 deficiency has been linked to 'black-tongue' syndrome in dogs, and a condition in humans called pellagra, also known as the "3-D" disease: diarrhoea, dementia and dermatitis, such as eczema.