how my mice roll - Page 15

Snakefood · 03-17-12, 05:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by exwizard

That is great.

Are these your rats or your mice?

these are my mice, I find that the older mamma's help the younger ones and I have a lower mortality rate leaving the whole colony together to raise the young.

My rat mamma's each get thier own birthing tubs to prevent maternal fights.

exwizard · 03-17-12, 05:25 PM

Very cool. Sometimes our female rats get their own tubs when nursing but sometimes they share a tub with one or two others. It all depends on our tub space issues at that time. I understand maternal fights but these rats know early on that they are part of a larger colony since the females get rotated in and out of the breeding tubs depending on their pregnancy status. Even before they were ready to be breeders, they were moved from one tub to another depending on space issues and growout sizes. Im more concerned with breeder males fighting since that will always happen once theyve been exposed to girls. This is why our breeder males each get their own tub.

Snakefood · 03-17-12, 05:30 PM

I have one male rat for each rat rack, each female gets her own permanent tub and the male rotates around thier tubs (so our males never meet). Then I have 1 rack for grow-outs.

exwizard · 03-17-12, 05:31 PM

That works as well.

Question I have is this. Are your females always alone when the male is not with them?

Snakefood · 03-17-12, 05:34 PM

seems to, I can't wait till rack #2 is up and running at full capacity, I'm having troubles keeping up with both my snakes needs and customer demand, hence the building of colony #2 for both mice and rats

exwizard · 03-17-12, 05:38 PM

I understand that and can relate to that quite well.

Our customer demand is quite high and even at the scale we operate on, we still have trouble keeping up. Our aim right now is to eventually have 15 males each in their own tubs in 3 racks with 75 females rotating between those racks and 3 other nursing racks. The rest of the racks will be for growouts and reserves and if need be, more nursing tubs.

exwizard · 03-17-12, 05:43 PM

The mice on the other hand we will continue to treat each lab cage as a separate colony and only the 3 growout cages will be mixed from those colonies, sexed and separated to keep things under control and eventually the mouse racks will be built and we will proceed from there.

Snakefood · 03-17-12, 05:48 PM

same here. I am keeping females as they are born to expand the colonies once hubby has the rack built, so instead of one producing colony of 1.4, it is expanding to 2 colonies of 1.10

exwizard · 03-17-12, 05:50 PM

Yes thatll work.

Snakefood · 03-17-12, 05:51 PM

yes, especially since I am hoping to add 2 more Corns to my collection this season!! Although I am planning on selling one.

exwizard · 03-17-12, 05:54 PM

Yeah but with more snakes, the need to feed them is increased.

Ive said this before but we started with way more rats than we needed to feed our own stock. I just did not want to ever run out and besides, this gave us the means to meet a lot of snake people here in the metro that we wouldve never met otherwise.

Snakefood · 03-17-12, 05:58 PM

True, I have met some interesting and helpful people while doing this. I can't wait for the spring show next month, being a vendor I am sure to meet more people than I did as an attendee. Sucks that I won't have any corn babies to sell this time, but hopefully I should by the fall show.

exwizard · 03-17-12, 06:00 PM

Were considering the Des Moines Show in a couple of weeks but Im not sure about our stock levels to pull that off. I remember selling out of all our stock in the van which was most of what we had at the time. Shortly after that we ran out of all our growouts and had to import rats from 4 different sources. Then the RI happened which wiped out most of them. It took a long time to recover from that and we dont have the numbers now that we had then. Time will tell I suppose.

Snakefood · 03-17-12, 06:05 PM

yes, it will.

I will mostly sell my rabbits and chickens rather than my rats and mice as I simply cannot yet compete with the prices my competition there will have.

But I'll also have some hand made hides, climbs, and other viv decorations. I may even have a few backgrounds finished by the time the show comes.

exwizard · 03-17-12, 06:07 PM

Oh I think youll do very well there with all that stuff available.

Our advantage at the Des Moines Show was that our rats were live and our wholesaler who also had a table sent people our way for the live rats. There was another rat breeder there but all he had was frozen as well.