A few of our rats

Here are some of our breeder rats; most offspring used for snake food, but the adults have a good life of breeding, resting, and rbeeding again :)

Here's my stud, Grullo. He is an older man in rattie years, but he still gets the job done. :)
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...ive/sudrat.jpg

Here's Oddessa, a weird-coated female; brown, gray and blueish tones in her. And she is not that old; less than a year. She's currently preggo and in her own pregger tank :)
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6.../weirdgirl.jpg

And here's Lucy and her current litter. She is a notorious escape artist; got out of a tank with a weighted down lid that had to be around 30 pounds; took a roll of blue maskig tape from a shelf, and somehow got it back into the tank. I went all-out and got some nice lid-locks for her and she hasn't gotten out since. She produces the most nice b/w babies. I fed off about half the litter, keeping the prettiest; I may get an outside male from a friend, and keep some of these gals for more breeders. :)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6.../mombabies.jpg

Now I have a question; one of my siamese females (not pictured) started doing this off thing, where she will slowly weave her head back/forth; what is this? I got her from my friend's colony, which, turns out, all do the same darned thing.. I am probably just giving her back to said friend to feed to her BCI, if this is an undesirable trait; any info?

Ok this is going to sound funny but... I love Lucy. Very cute babies she has too! :gj:

Thanks! She's the one that led my boyfriend on a 2 hour goose chase while I was at work last week! She somehow got out, and he had funiture moved around everywhere cuz he was trying to get her! :)
No more rattie escapees though; I revamped the tank lids.

The swaying you are seeing is just them trying to focus their eyes on objects. Pink-eyed and red-eyed rats have very limited vision and can only see about 2-3" in front of their face(and even normal eye-colored rats can only see about 6"). Even some brown-eyed and black-eyed rats sway. it's a very normal thing.

Your Oddessa is a very rusted black rat. Alot of the rats in the US have bad genes and will rust over time(black hairs turning brown). Like pastels browning out. Rats over in the UK, however, don't rust and remain black as night for their entire life. Pretty cool, hm? :)

Wow; thanks for the info! She was a pretty uniform gray for most of her life thus far, looking black when born. So it is maybe kinda like how some horses are born black and become white as they age? My friend has an appy mare who did that.