Rat genes! Is this megacolon? Is it safe to feed?

[tangerine]

So I've been breeding rats for only a few months (started on accident, actually, had two snakes refusing food so the feeders got left together and ended up producing a litter, decided I wanted to keep doing it and now here I am ). I got rid of that first male because I didn't like his markings, a bit too much like high-white and I didn't want megacolon. While looking for feeders, I found a guy on craigslist selling 15 small rats for $10. I forgot to break my $20 before I went to pick them up and he didn't have any change, so he threw in two breeder females (blue hooded and black berkshire) and one of his stud bucks. I wasn't going to say no, but unfortunately the stud is blazed.


(I'm not actually sure what his color is... agouti something-or-other, but he's grey more than brown. Anyone know?)

The black berk female was already a couple weeks along when we got her (by this same male), and her litter is almost 4 weeks old now. I noticed while cleaning cages this morning that one little girl bloated, hunched over, and her anus is protruding weirdly. I was worried about this from when I first took that boy home, but I've never actually seen pics of it, so... is this megacolon? And is it safe to feed her to my snakes? I know they eat whatever rat poop is in the intestines anyway, but...

Her markings:


Here you can really see her bloated tummy:


And here's the anus thing... almost makes her look like a boy.

[snakesRkewl]

Might be mega colon, feeding them won't hurt anything.
Getting a blaze can be risky, I've had a few that had to be culled because they were dominant trait high white.
I love breeding blazes, but you have to have recessive trait high white to do so safely.

[DooLittle]

Looks like a tubby little boy to me. I think that's his jibblies you are seeing.

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[tangerine]

Yeah, it kinda looks like testes, but she's definitely a girl. It's her anus and the skin right around it that's sticking out, not the space below. For comparison:

Her brother:


Her:

[aldebono]

If they look like they have swallowed a golf ball and it's very hard to the touch, then it's megacolon.

[LotusCorvus]

If it's soft squish, they're just chubbing up for a growth spurt, most likely. I've had a bunch of baby rats freak me out like that, either thinking they had megacolon or had somehow gotten pregnant really young. A few weeks/month later and they went through a noticeable growth spurt, but had slimmed down. I especially notice this happening when I switch foods to something they like better (I have auto-ship on my rat food so sometimes if I run out early I use dog food, which my rats don't like as much), and its pretty much always at about the same age as the rats in your picture.

Either way they should be safe to feed, as long as the largest non-squishable part of the rat isn't too big for the snake.

[tangerine]

Thanks for all the replies.

Her tummy isn't rock hard, but it's definitely firm. Whatever it is, I'll be feeding her off this weekend, and I think I'll find a different stud for my little colony...