Large First Litter

[JohnNJ]

I have very pretty seal point siamese first time mom. She just had a litter of 22, give or take since it's a big pile. Everyone is doing fine.

Do I just leave her alone and see what happens or do I cull? All of the babies are eating.

Thanks.

[mues155]

I would cull and feed off as many as you can...after a few days you will notice the runty ones and just to make the load lighter on the mom.
Pictures please!
the mother sounds gorgeous!

[llovelace]

Wow

[Rhasputin]

I agree, cull a few now while you can, before they start getting runty. There's almost no way unless you plan on hand feeding the babies, that the mom will be able to raise 22 healthy babies with no runts!

[Chimera Reptiles]

I also work with seal points and russian blue point siamese rats, they are by far my most prolific breeders. It's not uncommon for my mothers to spit out 16 pinkies at a time. You will find the ones that are lagging behind in a couple days. Feed them ones off to your smaller reptiles.

[Simple Man]

I agree with everyone here. Make sure you give her some table scraps too. The extra fat will help out a bit. My only problem is that the runts could actually be dwarfs that are feeding just fine. So I have to be careful

Regards,

B

[JohnNJ]

Update: The 22 babies were born sometime on Sunday. I took them all out and weighed them on Tuesday night. There were 20 left that weighed between 7 and 10 grams, most at 8-9g.

I left the 13 heaviest with the siamese mom and she was fine after a little bit of searching around and digging. I gave the other 7 to a dumbo mom whose litter was 3 1/2 weeks old and almost completely weaned. She was put into a tub alone with the babies and completely ignored them all night.

This morning I put the babies with another mom that had a 3 1/2 week old litter and she was all over them, cleaning and feeding. I took her litter and put them in with the dumbo mom and her litter. The dumbo mom is now VERY busy with two litters trying to feed. She only has to bear it until Sunday.

Hopefully the foster babies with thrive and the siamese mom has an easier time with just 13. We'll know in a few days.

[anthonym]

I agree with everyone here. Make sure you give her some table scraps too. The extra fat will help out a bit. My only problem is that the runts could actually be dwarfs that are feeding just fine. So I have to be careful

Regards,

B

NOW my little tiny rat from one of my litters makes sense.. haha. I have one that I thought was just a little runty guy, but kept him around. Right now he is about 6 weeks old and still the size of a mouse. I didn't realize there was such thing as a dwarf rat. Not to hijack the thread, but would I have any problems breeding him with females who will obviously be much larger than him?

[DemmBalls]

We had a litter of 23 and left them with mom. It was unproductive as they were slow growers and I needed them to bulk up for my bigger snakes. She ended up raising I think 19, the others disappeared but if that happens again I'll definately cull them because at 4 weeks they were all half the size they should have been.

[JohnNJ]

Update:

The litter is now almost two weeks old. The 13 that I kept with the original siamese mom are doing great. They are twice the size of the 7 babies I fostered with another mom. I just fed three of the smallest foster babies to cornsnakes and a kingsnake so there's four left. Those four will be frozen for the smaller snakes this weekend because I don't think they'll ever be normal size.

We'll see how many mom can produce with her next litter.