Feeder Growth Rate-Rats

Just wondering how long it takes your newborn litter to reach the size of a small rat?

Well it's taken my first babie's two week's to get to rat pup's . From what I've read they'd be small rat's in about 4 week's from birth.

You can check on rodent pro for there sizes,but we wean ours at 4 weeks.After that it just at matter of how much and what you are feeding them with the rate that they grow and your definition of a small rat you can get average size for small rats of rodent pro.Would say with ours it takes 3 to 4 weeks to reach small size depending on the size of the litter larger litters take longer to grow as they have to share the milk supply from mom till they are weaned.

Just to clarify from birth you've got 3.5 to 5 weeks before they are even weanling size (depending on when you wean), then a few more weeks of putting on size to be considered a small. As Mike said it depends on their access to good quality food, how many are in the tank to compete for that food and what size they were as weanlings to begin with. Larger litters can produce a bit smaller weanling but then you toss in the genetics of the parent rats and that can change the whole thing if they carry genetics to be an overly large or small rat.

I would say just off the top of my head that are smalls are generally about 8 weeks old or thereabouts. Remember too that the males of the litter tend to outsize their sisters quickly so often reach small size faster.

Thanks for the info...seems like you would have to stagger new litters so that you always had one particular size alvailable each week. Doesn't seem worth it just yet in my scenario. I'll stick with my frozen bags from rodentpro for now on. Thanks all.

Yep we didn't start breeding rats till we had 5 or 6 snakes to feed weekly and since we had everything from quite young BP's to a 6 foot BCI it worked out really well. Even with my colony running I had to go out today and trade a bunch of over-sized feeders to a local pet store for smaller ones as I've got really little, kinda little, and...GREAT BIG lazy butt feeder rats that I can't use since the big BCI went to his forever home last month.

I usually breed my female rats in pairs and time the pairs so I've got one duo ready to pop while another are just preggie and another set are heading into the male's cage for some "quality rat time".

Totally off topic - but someone *cough*Mike*cough* needs to change their siggy! Or have his wife clue him into the fact they have two more normal females (or was that a secret?) LOL