ONE baby...

An update; the one baby and mom are doing great (except she dug the shavings into a huge mound that touched the waterbottle nozzle, which made things a soppy mess this morning; don't worry, I cleaned up, lol.) I am wondering, maybe this baby will grow faster and be more robust than one from a normal litter, due to the individual attention maybe? I wouldn't be afraid of it passing on "bad genes" since this mom has had nice litters before; it may be a keeper..

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Originally Posted by mlededee

and that's so different from humans? :O

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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Good one Em!

Gin, I bet that one baby will be a very fat well fed one (you should call it Uno or something funny like that). Anytime I've had a smaller litter they seem to be porkers since they don't have to fight for the 12 available teats.

Cool; I was debating on feeding it to my horned frog, but I grew a little bit attached to the tiny thing; it is small for a pinkie; maybe she did eat the sibs for smoe reason..?

You'll probably never know Gin and hard to say. Either she'll have tons of milks for that one pinkie or if it's tiny and weak it won't stimulate her milk production enough and die or she may cull it herself. Only time will tell.

On my rats I will rebreed them after a bad litter to make sure ... they are usually removed from the colony for this.

Every now and then I come across a great female that is at the end of her breeding cycle. Rather than feeding her off I'll keep giving her litters. I read somewhere that mice can be kept lactating for up to 6 months by continually putting oung litters on them ... I havent done specific testing on this, but one of my females has been going for about 3 months.

As producing litters takes alot out of the females I have them on a special diet. It has alot of carbs, higher protein, higher crude fat, and bones for calcium.

Bryan