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Post by fuzzymom on Mar 24, 2009 12:50:07 GMT -5
I'm still thinking of culling that one female. She still has fur missing. No babies yet, but I haven't checked the females in a day or two. I've just been feeding and watering them. Its almost time for a cage clean so I'll check them all then. Weigh them too. I can't wait to have a decent colony going so that I can start providing my ferrets and snakes with "homegrown" food.
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Post by fuzzymom on Mar 31, 2009 9:55:23 GMT -5
Checked and cleaned the mouse group today. One female is looking thin and frail but the others are healthy and look great. The orange and white female who was losing fur is growing it all back. She's looking great! I checked for pregnancies and I believe one girl to be pregnant. If she is pregnant, I suspect her to be 2 weeks along. I will keep 3-4 females from that litter if there are enough females to do so, and keep them for my second breeding group.
I'm hoping to get a mouse tub put together in April so I can move the mice in there. Glass tanks are so obnoxious.
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Post by harrisi on Mar 31, 2009 10:36:32 GMT -5
Hehe, yeah glass tanks can be pretty annoying. Sounds good, hopefully that one female is pregnant and has plenty of little babies to feed/breed! Are you going to cull the thin/frail female?
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Post by fuzzymom on Mar 31, 2009 10:44:51 GMT -5
If she doesn't improve in the next day or so, then I will cull her. All the others look great. She's the smallest of the 4 females, even though she is the same age as the others.
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Post by fuzzymom on Apr 2, 2009 22:26:45 GMT -5
The thin female died today. She died early this morning (she was still soft when I found her) so I fed her off to the ferrets. Twitch was extremely happy that mommy finally gave her "real" food. Haha.
The black female mouse is definitely pregnant. She is getting bigger and she's showing the pregnant pudge. She has not ballooned out yet so I think she has another week to week and a half to go.
I'm excited to get this mouse breeding underway. The other two females are not showing signs of pregnancy yet but I'm keeping an eye on them.
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Post by fuzzymom on Apr 4, 2009 8:44:58 GMT -5
We got feeders yesterday and two of the feeders turned out to be pregnant. I have a thing about feeding off pregnant females so we set them up in a small tank with bedding, food, and water and we will wait for their babies.
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Post by fuzzymom on Apr 6, 2009 22:43:49 GMT -5
Current Breeding Males: 1 Current Breeding Females: 5 Current Litters Produced: 0 Current Offspring Produced: 0
I'm not sure if the second feeder mouse is actually pregnant. I took a closer look at her this morning when I went to feed everyone and she's plump but not getting bigger to the side. I will keep an eye on her and in a few days if she isn't getting any bigger out to the side, then I'm feeding her off. The other one is obviously preggers and will be kept as a future breeding female if she raises this litter well. I suspect it is her first litter due to her age and size.
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Post by fuzzymom on May 13, 2009 12:32:15 GMT -5
Major changes to the mouse "colony". I fed off the first breeding group due to them not breeding. Either the females were getting pregnant and reabsorbing the litters or they just were not getting pregnant to begin with. Its been hot up there some days but now we are running the ac a bit more and its starting to cool down. I had a second group of females in with a male and they killed the male, but its possible one or two of the females got pregnant before they killed him.
So that leaves me with 3 females. I am hoping to get some more breeding groups established but it all depends on whether my mother in law will let me.
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Post by fuzzymom on May 16, 2009 9:49:28 GMT -5
I did some math yesterday and if I wanted to breed enough mice to supply my snakes with food, I'll need 18 breeding females, all breeding at different times. This will not even begin to cover the diet needs of my ferrets. Hopefully soon I will be making mouse tubs that will hold a 1.3 breeding group each. These tubs will be stackable so they can fit in small spaces and will be lightweight for easy cleaning. I will take pictures as I make these tubs and will let you know how they work for me.
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Post by fuzzymom on Jul 28, 2009 11:54:17 GMT -5
We had to start all over again. We switched the place where we get the mice and we have 3 females to one male. So far so good. One is starting to look plumper than the other two girls. Keep your fingers crossed. I'm currently trying to find out how many females I will need to provide me with enough mice to feed both my ferrets and my snakes. So far I will need 65 rodents per week.
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Post by goingpostal on Jul 28, 2009 14:00:10 GMT -5
Wow, 65 mice a week! That's a lot of feeders. I've pretty much come to the conclusion I can't breed enough mice to supply more than a snack amount for the ferrets, a least without turning an entire bedroom into a mouse colony which is too much work. But even still I am feeding the snake and getting the fuzzies some whole prey for less than buying just the snake's mice monthly.
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Post by fuzzymom on Jul 28, 2009 15:01:13 GMT -5
65 mice per week would give me enough for the snakes that eat mice (about 9 of them are on mice, 6 of which eat two at a time) so thats 15 mice for the snakes, and then you figure about 50 for the ferrets per week. That allows for about 7 per day for the ferrets (1-2 mice per ferret. Makes up half their diet). Looooots of mice. So now I need to figure out how many breeding females I need in order to produce over 200 mice a month.
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Post by harrisi on Jul 29, 2009 3:14:45 GMT -5
With the snakes that are eating 2 mice at a time why not switch to rats? We cull most of our rats at weaner stage (4 weeks) and at that time they are plenty big enough for a days feed for our hob ferrets, so they hardly eat anything (saving more money) but are a nice size. I got tired of mice, if they wern't eating babies they just wern't breeding I much prefer rats and its cheaaaap. hehe.
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Post by harrisi on Jul 29, 2009 3:21:20 GMT -5
As far as mice colonies go though, if you need 65 mice per week I would breed 8-9 mice per week, so say the cycle per mouse is 8 weeks (3 weeks gestation, 4 weeks weaning, 1 week resting) then you would need.....8 colonies of 8 female mice at the VERY least so that would be 64 female mice and then 1 male per 4 females = 16? males. I would recommend 1.4 if you were trying to breed as a complete source for the snakes/fuzzies.
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Post by fuzzymom on Jul 29, 2009 14:43:00 GMT -5
If I was feeding rats instead of mice to those snakes eating two mice each, I would have to start breeding a lot more rats. Then I'd be using 9 rats per week, and 3 of those have to be small rats (150+g) and right now I just don't have the space to be producing 1-2 rat litters per week. I have 2 female rats. One is around 280g and I'm estimating her to be around 2-3 months old, so she's almost big enough to breed. I'm going to try getting her up to 300 before breeding her. The other isn't even 150g in weight and I'd estimate her to be about 6-8 weeks old, so she's nowhere near ready to breed. Still, that is 2 female rats to breed in the next few months (give the younger another month or two to grow) and with those two, if I alternate them, I could be getting one litter every month or so. I think. So we are thinking having 8 colonies of 8 females. Now should I pull the males when the females are pregnant? I've never done this with mouse breeding before, only with rats. So lets say I do pull the males, can the males live together or should they be seperated? I could have two groups per "colony" and rotate the male between them. So that is 8 male mice for 16 groups of 4 females. I could set them up 1.4, so that means 16 enclosures for the mice, and 8 for the males. That is not too bad. I can see if my sister will make me a mouse rack (as I do not have mad rack making skills) It could be 4 tubs tall and 6 tubs long. That gives me enough room for all the breeding groups. Then I can try and get her to build me a holder rack for the feeders. I will keep you updated on this.
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