asf's and mazuri 6f

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Originally Posted by mcavana

Very interesting. when you take out the babies once are they are weaned, do you just throw them together with same size babies from other breeding groups?

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When we remove a weaned litter, we put just that litter in a "grow out" tub, which is a large (18-1/2" x 15-1/4" x 5-1/4") cat litter pan. The ASFRs usually have a dozen or more babies in a litter so that's about as many as we want in one tub. Their negative reaction to overcrowding doesn't seem to develop until they reach adulthood and we normally feed them off by then.

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Originally Posted by mcavana

I am using 10 gallon tanks. what would you consider "overcrouded" for grow up tanks?

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If I were using 10 gallon tanks instead of the large litter pans (which I have done), I would stick with the same plan I described in the comments above. I prefer the litter pans over the aquariums for several reasons:

We keep extra litter pans on hand and just swap our rodents from the dirty pan to the clean one and then carry all the dirty pans outside and clean them at the same time. It really cuts down on cleaning time. Since the litter pans nest inside each other, a stack of them doesn't take up much room. Try stacking 10 gallons aquariums and see what happens! :rolleye2:

The litter pans are much cheaper to purchase, much lighter to handle, have no silicone for your rodents to chew and possibly ingest, are less fragile and are much easier to wash and dry than aquariums.

My only concern when I decided to put the ASFRs in litter pans, was that I had heard they were MAJOR LEAGUE CHEWERS and I thought they might chew through the plastic pans. After 2 years, we have not had the first problem with that.

Now that I've said that, I will probably go down to the rodent barn and find ASFRs running rampant throughout the building. :O

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Originally Posted by mcavana

Last, but not least... So you never have to put new blood into the colony??? In other words, you never have to put a newbee in to mix up the gene pool a bit?

Thanks again for taking the time to answer all my questions!

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We don't claim to be experts on any of this. I'm sure there are people on this forum that are much more qualified to answer some of these questions.

That said, we have had good results using siblings to establish new breeding groups and we have had some problems when using unrelated animals. If the unrelated animals were introduced at an early age, say right after weaning, and then raised together, I would think that your chance for success would greatly increase.

Keep in mind that all of our breeders were produced from the original 2 trios that we started with, so they're all "cousins", so to speak. ;)

I hope I have been of some help to you. Good luck!

Our second colony was established with siblings from the first colony. If we want fresh genetics, we'll just go buy a whole new young adult group from an ASF breeder since these rats really do NOT like to have their groups disturbed in anyway. I made the mistake a few months back of taking a particularily nice looking young female ASF from the feeder tank and placing her back into her original colony (1 male, 2 females). Even though she'd come from that colony the adult females (one of them her own mother) immediately went after her and within seconds had drawn blood. It was quite obvious they intended to kill her. There were no pinks in the enclosure at the time. We thought perhaps it was a safe time to introduce another female but no way I'll try that again!

first off we use kent 23% rodent diet. We have had sucess intruducing new females into new groups. We are careful to try and not buy from the same breeders every time because we found most breeders are breeding back constantly and noticed some who have done this alot have smaller soft furs. We intruduced a new female to a male and female combo when we made a new bin. We did make sure that the new one is slightly larger than the other 2.