Mouse breeding organization and schedule...

[cchardwick]

So I've been cranking out the baby mice for about a month now, I have plenty for all my snakes (16 snakes) and don't have to go to the pet store anymore but I still have to thaw out a few to cover my bases, so I came up with this new plan below. The problem now is that I have more adult mice and not enough baby mice, earlier I had a few too many young and not enough adults. So I thought I'd outline my plan in case you want to try it yourself.

• Tank #1 (20 gallon): Feeder Males. I have all my male baby mice in it. As soon as they are weaned they are separated male / female and go into their respective tanks. All my tanks are glass critter cages with screen tops, on the tanks with the males, especially this one, I keep a carbon filter pad on top to eliminate the smell. This is the stinkiest tank and I feed from this tank first feeding off my males. If I don't have enough to feed I use some of my females from the tank below. I have been feeding the older males first as they seem to fight the most.

• Tank #2 (40 gallon): Females (babies and breeders). Resting female breeders go into this tank as well as female babies that are just weaned. After the male tank gets low or empty I'll feed from this tank. Once it really fills up I'll start another 40 gallon tank as a reserve then freeze some if necessary (CO2 first). If I happen to sell any mice I'd rather sell from this tank as the females don't really smell at all and make good pets. Just have to watch out that I don't get a male in this tank or all heck will break loose and it will really mess up my operation!!!

• Tank #3 (20 gallon): Stud male and one female. I plan on using my largest females from the tank above and putting them in with the male for a week at a time. After the week the female gets moved to a 10 gallon to have her babies and a new female is introduced from the female tank, I plan on introducing the new female right after a good cleaning. If the male gets too aggressive I'll replace him with a younger male from the feeder male tank.

• Tank #4-9 (10 gallon): Pregnant females. Six tanks total, so the female goes into one tank every week and after six weeks the young should be old enough to be weaned. The young get separated into the male (feeder) and female (breeder) tanks and the female (mom) goes into the female breeder tank. Females that look old will be fed off and replaced with younger mice for new breeders. I'm actually breeding fancy mice so I know which mice are which based on the color of the current feeder males and which haven't been bred for awhile and need to be put with the stud (hard to do with all white mice!). I can totally control the number of feeders coming out of this operation by increasing or decreasing the length of time they spend with the male. If I go a week and a half instead of a week it cuts my mouse production by 50% or so.

So that's a total of 10 tanks, I think it will work great with my current setup. I'll have mice of all different ages for all of my different sized snakes. I have some small baby colubrids that need live pinky mice and I need a constant supply, also have some young ball pythons that need adult mice. It's weird, so far I've had about 80% males and just a few females, not sure if that's random or depends on the line of mice.

[Freakzter]

thank you very much. I need to figure out how to produce 50 mice a week rather quickly. different sources list different methods it's quite confusing.

[cchardwick]

I just started it this week, what's funny is that if I have a male with several females I often times hear them fighting with the male. I just put the male in with a single female and so far after several days there is no fighting at all, kind of interesting. 50 a week is a lot! I'd probably go with 5 females per tank in six tanks and rotate the male every week. I actually need 16 per week, assuming they all eat (they usually all don't eat every week). I supplement with rats and ASFs. I like to feed off my ASFs really young to my King snakes, they are a bit too quick to feed as adults, don't like to see them hop around, I like to see them get eaten LOL. Mice are a bit slower and easier for the snakes to get. I've actually been feeding fresh killed with CO2, most will eat them that way, I had a couple this week that refused fresh killed and both immediately ate a live one. I've really come to like CO2, it puts the mice down super fast and it's safe for the snakes.

I'm also really paranoid about having a male in my female tank since I'm mixing in baby females with my breeder females in a 40 gallon. Every few days I go through and pick them up and double check just to make sure! I'm thinking I should have a separate female 'feeder' tank other than my female breeder tank so I don't have to add babies and risk putting a baby male in there. If I were to put a male in there with 10-20 females and they all had babies all at once I would have so many all at once and then none for a while, it would mess everything up LOL. But I do like the idea of having a resting female breeder tank to give the moms a break for awhile. I've also noticed that when I put in the resting females that they tend to fight a bit at first. Even now with mice of all ages I see them fight once in awhile, nothing really serious though. It almost seems like any batch of mice will fight a bit at first to figure out the pecking order. There are a few that have gotten really nasty, usually in mixed male / female tanks. I feed those off ASAP. I've also noticed that pregnant females tend to fight a lot right before they give birth, personally I think it's better to isolate them (may not be feasible with 50 mice per week!).