male degu introductions- is all this normal?

[cleocat]

Yesterday I brought home a new male degu (13 weeks old) to introduce to my older male degu who had been widowed when we adopted him, we think he is about a year and a half old or so. When we introduced them, our older male was very excited to have a new friend and was eager to groom the new degu and was constantly tweeting at him (the greeting/grooming sound) so no problem there. However unexpectedly the new degu was a bit aggressive to our older one, and he was the one initiating the dominance fights (mounting, chasing eachother etc.)
It's been 24 hours now and we kept them in a cage split down the middle so they could get used to eachother but not hurt eachother, and we've been letting them out in the room together where they were fighting, but also grooming eachother and seemingly getting on. The fights don't seem to be dangerous and afterwards they do groom eachother and tweet..after a while the fights became less frequent and they began to get on more so we've unseperated the cage and put them in there together (supervised of course). They have occasional little scraps but nobody gets hurt and it's definitely improving. Is all this normal? And also, how will we know when one of the degus has "submitted" to the other one after a fight and when they've resolved the dominance dispute?

[cleocat]

I think all is well now, they are currently in a "degu pile" of two in their hammock! Looking very happy, sleepy and comfy. I think it's safe to say they're pretty taken with eachother!

[deguconvert]

It isn't always clear when submission has happened, and other times it is. Of our three boys, one had a particularly troublesome adolescense! He was determined something awful to be the top goo, and not matter how many times Reep ( true top goo) put him in line, he wouldn't give up. Finally we had to separate them when we found blood in the cage. It took five long months of daily working with them to finally get them all back together, and then all of a sudden . . . they were perfect. I accidentally put the wrong goos back into the wrong cage, which meant that the two combatants were together over night. I have no idea I had done that until the next morning when my daughter screamed and said, Reep and Peek are together in the cage!!! Sure enough, there they were, sleeping together and looking like sweet nothings and sugar. Over the next few days I would see Peek run up to Reep and flip over onto his back with this belly exposed, right in front of Reep's nose. Then he would beg like crazy for Reep to groom him. If Reep turned to go away, Peek would scoot along on his side (funniest looking thing) trying to stay in front of Reep, all the while chirping and burbling away as he begged to be groomed. He did this all day for probably 3-4 days, and then everything settled down into a happy routine. It was very demonstrative submission!