advice on my dagus

Question
i have three dagus....two that i actually bought that are girls and another that someone just kinda dumped on me that was also suppose to be a girl. I've had them for a few months and they all get along really well. the cage is pretty big and whatnot but i noticed one of them is getting kinda pudgy and i'm thinking that it's pregnant. I brought the one that was supposed to be the third girl to a local pet store and the women told me it was a male. I'm wondering if you can help me? I wanna make sure I do this right. One of my friends ended up with a pregnant rat and all the babies ate each other and  think the mother might have ate one or two of them as well. I'm not sure if the dagus will do this or how and if i should go about separating the three and what do I do when the babies come? I've been trying to look stuff up but everything I find is pretty vague. Please help, I definitely got myself into this  situation on  and I wanna make sure I go about it right

Answer
The males actually help raise the babies, but you are going to have a huge issue with inbreeding shortly as the babies mature if you don't get it figured out soon.  Check out http://degumania.110mb.com/degu_gender.html and learn how to tell male from female on your own.  The female can get pregnant again immediately after birth, so the male should be removed.  They will be infertile again for a while (a few weeks# while nursing, but by 5 weeks old all babies should be separated by gender, the males living with dad and the females living with mom.  If you are going to sell/give away the babies make sure they go in groups--degus are very social animals and do not always do well alone. Considering you are going to have potentially 2 females giving birth here soon, you need to develop a plan on dealing with a whole lot of animals.  The 'other' female usually will help raise the babies also, but occasionally you might find an issue, in which case you need to separate her out.  #Think many cages!#

At this point, it sounds like your best bet is to see how things go after birth, sell the dad with some of the sons and keep your two original girls.  The biggest issue most folks face in your shoes is that after seeing the babies born and start growing up, they are sooo cute and no one can bear to part with them...they keep them together as a family unit #since everyone is getting along afterall# and poof! all the baby girls and mom are pregnant again by various males and you start getting genetically unstable babies from all the inbreeding.  They will be more susceptible to diseases, they have shorter lives, sometimes are even stillborn and can kill the mom in labor.

Thanks for being proactive and figuring out what to do now.  Good Luck!