A few ASF questions. also my first litter.

[Sasha2]

I am curious why my male ASF is hanging out almost all the time up on top the water bottle. Ive even seen him sleep up there.Is it because the females are running him off? Maybe because they just had a litter? They have plenty of room in a 55 gallon and several hides but only use the one under the heat lamp.
Also a I notice a big discrepancy in the size of the four females.They were all from the same group and started out the same size, now one of the females is huge(not prego just double the size of the others) and I also have one that is exceptionally small that Im concerned about.

Im just so new to these guys I dont know what normal is.

I only have the one male now as the other was losing weight and wasnt doing good so I fed him off. I certainly cant afford to lose the one and only male if the females are beating him up. I also noticed when the boa that ate him pooped that it was a gob of hair, I wonder how digestable these guys are.

[travesty]

The male hanging out by himself and hiding from them at first is kind of typical until the females really accept him. And even after that that my male stud will usually stand guard outside the nest box if there are babies. Unless he's got a bunch of bites or you see extreme aggression I wouldn't worry too much about that.

As far as size goes, its possible that the big one is actually a male. The females take a long time to get big and I've had a few girls that seem to never really get to full size.

[Minkness]

He may just like it up there. Some do that. I had mice that would fight over who got to be on top of the bottle lol.

As far as size goes, the bigger one is probably the dominant and restricting food to the others. You need multiple food dishes or even to just throw food directly into the tank. Also, offer some cat food since they are breeders. They will want/need a bit of extra protine. But not too much.

Also, I found it better to just leave the male separate and rotate the females through his tank when ready to breed. He almost always had 1 female for comapny and 2 the other females woild be in the main tub. Then I had another tub to put the baby males after they fot about 4-5 weeks old to prevent breeding. Males were always fed off first.

[travesty]

I don't know much about mice but I don't rotate my asf's. Even pulling the male out for a day will make the females territorial enough to kill them. There is a lot of info on asf's here Breeding ASFs :: Metal Monkey Exotics (http://www.metalmonkeyexotics.com/blog/?page_id=822) that helped me a lot when I first got them. I modeled my cages after theirs' and they rock.

[Sasha2]

Thanks all. First I will check to make sure that big one is a female, that will kind of tick me off if its a male as I bought them as females.
I dont like the idea of pulling out the male if I dont have to, its cold in the basement and I dont have any spare heat. I havent picked him up to check for bites. Im actually kind of afraid of these little buggers. Ive been bit by a rat down to the bone on my thumb and have no desire to have that ever happen again. But will do what I have to with gloves on.
I did recently start adding more dog food (the good stuff) to them. I dont have catfood.
I have two ten gallon tanks for grow outs, but was hoping not to need them till it warmed up this spring.

[travesty]

They can bite pretty hard if they get spooked enough. Good luck. The gap between the two potty holes should be noticeably wider on the males compared to females.