ASF Carnage

Anyone know the reason why ASFs will sometimes gang up on one of their siblings and kill him/her? I'm not talking about mothers culling their babies. I've heard others mention they've seen a whole tub of ASFs gang up on one and kill in it minutes... I just had this happen for the first time yesterday.

My tub was fresh and clean. They had plenty of food, water, and space to run around. But I checked on them and found about a 5 or 6 week old ASF eaten alive...

Anyone understand the psyche behind the ASFs doing this?

I actually had the same thing happen yesterday for the first time. They killed the runt of the litter

Only response I have to this is they are wild animals with instincts. Some of those instincts will never be understood.

Maybe the siblings were able to determine that there was physically something wrong with the victim? Maybe it was a mental thing where either the victim was trying to be a bully, or the opposite where it was a victim of the bully?

Could also have been that the victim died or was dying for whatever reason.... it is very common when an asf dies to get partially eaten by its cage mates.

I think only mother nature could answer this one...

My male is starting to get beat up by his females after a year of living together harmonously through many litters.

I'm probably going to have to feed him off, because he's really getting beat up pretty badly lately, and make sure I don't feed off one of his older sons, so that I can replace him. I'm going to hate the lull in prodution while the son gets sexually mature though. :(

I've noticed some deaths which I believe are from siblings after I put them in the grow out tub from my group 1 which has also had deaths while still with the parents. My group 2 has had zero deaths with parents so I'm going to put those weanlings in a separate tub and see if I get any deaths from them.

I have a theory that one of my females from group 1 is mental and is passing it on to her babies. :D
So if I continue to have zero deaths from group 2 I'll feed off group 1 and start another group with group 2's babies.

Hope you understood all that. But at least it appears you are not the only one.

It's weird how breeding groups can be soo different from one another...

I've had 4 breeding groups now and the originals were decent. They'd produce on average about 12 babies of which 2 or 3 would always be still borns or culled. Another group of 1.3 went through 8 litters with ZERO survivors! So I've fed them all off. And another group pops 15 babies out every few weeks... Only problem with them is that they turn their food to dust... None of my other tubs do that!

They're crazy little buggers...

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Originally Posted by rabernet

My male is starting to get beat up by his females after a year of living together harmonously through many litters.

I'm probably going to have to feed him off, because he's really getting beat up pretty badly lately, and make sure I don't feed off one of his older sons, so that I can replace him. I'm going to hate the lull in prodution while the son gets sexually mature though. :(

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I think females lose a lot of baby making power after a year or so. Not sure if that's the reason but you may want to consider raising up some new breeding females.

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Originally Posted by euphuistical

I think females lose a lot of baby making power after a year or so. Not sure if that's the reason but you may want to consider raising up some new breeding females.

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I'm beginning to do so, but my founding females are still having litters of 13-15 babies each.

Oh very nice. I seem to have a lul in production now. A few females look kinda prego but I think it's mostly to do with feeding off a lot of babies to my two new baby snakes.

It does seem that about 10 months to a year of big litter production is about all you get usually though if you're still getting good numbers , Robin, then I'd raise up a son too.

As far as ASF being killed and eaten (or eaten after they die) it's just animals being animals I think. If a cagemate dies, there's no reason to not turn him into free protein plus it cleans up the body before it rots and stinks up the area which their instincts tell them would bring in predators. If a community member is sick, weak or even too domineering the other rats will just deal with it as animals do by taking out the source of the problem. It's nasty to us but then ASF's don't have to deal with our emotional issues (lucky them LOL).

I'd just watch the group for any pattern developing where there are unexplained deaths. If the deaths continue then delve into it further. It's likely just an isolated incident though.