ASF Litter sizes

Thanks everyone for all your help, I'll be picking some up this week. :-)

I've got two main sources for my ASF's. The first colony is a little smaller and had first litters of about 8 and a record so far of 13 for a later litter. The nice thing about this colony is that they don't bite.

Just got a first litter from a new bigger animal colony and I couldn't believe how wide the girl got before having 17 babies. The down side is these ones act like they would bite given the chance.

So now I'm going to try to set up hybrid colonies and see if I can eventually get the good temperament with the large size and litters. Anyone try this yet and find it hard to do (i.e. maybe a gene that makes my first colony nice also actually makes them less prolific or the same gene that makes big litters promotes aggression)? I suspect it's just that one source was selectively bred for temperament and the other for production and you tend to loose ground on whatever you aren't actively selecting for.

I’m feeding 6F with a supplement of millet based bird seed which they really seem to like and I was told helps babies grow faster. Apart from the biting which I seem to have accidently gotten some good genes for my only complaint about ASF’s so far is slow grow out. Since they don’t eat much I guess it doesn’t matter as long as I set up enough grow out tubs and eventually get the pipeline full. I’m thinking wean at 4 weeks and then grow out another 4 weeks?