Male mouse management...

[cchardwick]

I've been breeding mice for about a month or so now, I started with two colonies of one male to several females. For the very first litters there was cannibalism of the babies so I started moving the females to separate cages when they are so big they are about to pop, usually just a few days before birth. This has been working wonderfully, I have some very large litters of up to 13 babies with zero cannibalism. Now I'm down to two pairs of just a male and female in two separate cages, I'm guessing these last two females were probably too young to breed and are coming up to be next in line. Then I will have two cages with just the males. I was thinking of moving all of my baby mice to a 40 gallon breeder once they are weaned to grow them out a bit before I feed them off, perhaps feed off the young males first and keep the females until they are a bit bigger since the males tend to fight more.

So I have at least one female that has a litter of four that are almost weaned. Should I put her back in with the male and for how long? How do you manage your males and females without cannibalism of the babies and without too much fighting? I was thinking that if I kept the male alone or with just one female at a time for just a few days at a time I could cut down on fighting and cannibalism. Thoughts? Right now it seems like I have quite a bit of fighting with one of my male / female pairs, I was thinking of feeding off one male and just keeping the one male as a breeder.

[Stewart_Reptiles]

The key is selective breeding, proper nutrition, and limited stress, I keep 3 females per tubs and I rotate my males through 3 tubs each spending 2 weeks at the time in each tub. I have zero cannibalism or fight / agression, it was not always like that it took me 2 tries before building up the perfect colony that has now been producing babies generation after generation for the past 9 years.

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[cchardwick]

The key is selective breeding, proper nutrition, and limited stress, I keep 3 females per tubs and I rotate my males through 3 tubs each spending 2 weeks at the time in each tub. I have zero cannibalism or fight / agression, it was not always like that it took me 2 tries before building up the perfect colony that has now been producing babies generation after generation for the past 9 years.

Sounds like a great system! So you remove all of your young mice when you put your males back in the tubs? Are they all weaned by then? Sounds like it takes three weeks to have babies and another three weeks to wean them. Do you have hides or nesting material in your tubs? I may use my 20 gallon critter cages for each set of three females, I should have had that system down from the start. Although I think it may be a good idea to have young mice have their first litter in isolation so they can figure out what the birthing process is all about, may reduce cannibalism. Right now I have two males but I may feed one off and go to your system. I assume you replace all your breeders every eight months or so?

Do you separate your male and female babies when removing them from the cages? Or do you put them all together until they are fed off? Looks like you'd get about 15 babies per week with this system, that's about perfect for me since I have 15 snakes. Of course when my ball pythons grow up a bit they would eat more than one per week.

I like the idea of just having one male adult mouse since the male mice stink so bad!

[Stewart_Reptiles]

I have no hides, no toys (just a piece of 1x2 used as chew block) and use pine as bedding, all my mice are house in a freedom breeder mice rack.

By the time the males go back to the first group of females the babies are weaned and out of those tubs, either fed off already, or held back.

Males and females are seperated, males being fed off first except for a few that are set to replace my breeders.

Breeders are replaced after 5 litters.

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[SwedishBalls]

I keep my mice in colonies, and never take the male out. I breed for maximum production, and so far this has worked best for me.
I got 1.5 and 1.6 colonies.
Never had a issue with cannibalism, exept a few first-time moms, but it's quite a while since i've noticed it.

The litters range from 15-22, with a peak at 24 babies so far, and have been steady at that for the last few years.

I replace the breeders at around 15 months.
At that time they usally have gone down to 10-12 babies a litter, and it's time to retire/get fed off