My rodent breeding setup and snake room photos (lots of pics!)

[cchardwick]

I've been working on organizing my rodent breeding setup for quite some time and finally have a pretty good system down, so I thought I'd share it with everyone. It's a pretty non-typical system. I don't like rack systems for rodents, it just seems a bit unethical to me. I like to see what's going on and give them a lot of room and even a wheel to run around on. Here's some info below:

I actually mix my own food for my rodents. I store all of my grain and seeds in quart mason jars since I have access to about 1,000 mason jars. My mix consists of 7 jars of seeds, from left to right I have two jars of bird seed that is mostly nuts, this stuff is like rocket fuel for the rats and mice and I like to have twice the amount compared to everything else. The next jar is 'COB', or Corn / Oats / Barley. The corn is pressed and rolled, kind of cool. The next jar is 16% pig feed, then scratch mix for chickens, then whole corn, then sunflower seeds. The corn costs less than $10 for 50 pounds, most other stuff costs less than $15 per pound, and the most expensive bird nut mix is about $1 per pound. I'd say overall it probably costs me $15 per 50 pounds of mix. I get it all at the local Big R feed store. I'll actually buy a bag of corn, then as I empty jars I'll fill them with corn. Then I'll buy a bag of something else and fill the empty jars with that stuff. Eventually I just keep rotating which bag of stuff I buy and keep filling the jars as I go.




I usually mix it in a five gallon bucket seven jars at a time. I mix it up well by hand and then refill the mason jars with the ready to use mix.



I can quickly mix up two cases of feed for my rodents. I go through about three jars every two days for all my rats, ASFs and mice.



In this rack I have a variety of tank sizes with mice in the smaller tanks, ASFs in the 20 gallons, and rats in the 40 gallon tank.



I use plastic hides for my rats so I can see how many rats and babies I have in the tank with just a glance. I don't have to open up any drawers or move any hides to figure out what I have. I'm thinking of replacing some of my other hides with plastic as well.



I also have a rodent freezer, I started feeding frozen thawed until I found out my ball pythons were so picky, so now I use that as an overflow and feed frozen thawed, fresh killed and live.



Here's a shot of one of my mouse tanks. I keep male / female pairs in each tank and remove the babies when they are weaned. The babies go into a 20 gallon holding tank until they get fed off.



I raise my ASF in colonies, usually one adult male per tank with several females and a bunch of babies. The ASF grow really slow, and that has good and bad sides to it. The good side is that I can keep smaller feeder size rodents for several weeks where the rats and mice would get too big too fast. However, production is really slow as well.



For my frozen thawed I take the mice out of the freezer, put them in ziplock bags and then put them in a small fridge overnight to thaw. Then about an hour or two before I'm ready to feed I put them in this reptile incubator set at 110F. It keeps the rodents a perfect feeding temp. My ball pythons seem to be feeding on F/T much better since I went to this system since they never get a rodent that is too hot or too cold, and I believe that's one of the reasons ball pythons don't like F/T.



So I tared an empty jar and weighed the grain, looks like it's just over a pound per jar (1.157 pounds per jar). So that's 50 / 1.157 = 43 jars for about $15. So 43 jars / 3 jars per feeding = 14 feedings.

If I feed every other day that's feeding all rodents for a month for about $15! The only other cost is bedding, and I change that once a week and it costs me about $3 per week. So in all I'm probably at $30 per month, and that's producing probably around 100 rodents per month of various sizes.



I just pulled this card table out from the garage and man do I really like it! It gives me a large work area to work with.



On the left side of the room I have another four 40 gallon tanks with rats. I keep resting females in one, then put them in with the male, one per week. Then when they are ready to have babies I pull them into another tank. So I have three tanks with females and babies, then once I get another pregnant female I combine the older babies with moms, then eventually put the moms in the female resting tank and feed off the young. This system gives me one new batch of rat babies per week, up to 16 rats per week. With the larger 40 gallon tanks I have plenty of room to increase the amount of rats per tank and could do 2 or 3 moms per tank and get two or three times the production if my collection ever expands.



This is my CO2 gas chamber for euthanizing rodents. I use a CO2 cartridge and Tupperware container, I just put a towel over the top when I use it and wait about two minutes before I open it up. It works great. Usually I only gas adult rodents, I usually feed pinky rats and mice live as long as their eyes are not open. Once they get big enough to open their eyes I raise them up a bit and use the CO2 chamber. I have small king snakes that need pinky mice, otherwise I would be breeding all rats. And I think I like my king snakes too much to get rid of them LOL.



Here are two kinds of hides I use for my mice. For females ready to give birth I use the one on the left. It contains all the babies and you don't have any that get lost in the bedding and die, a problem I had at first. When they get a bit bigger I go to a hide like the one on the right, only a bit smaller to fit into the small tanks. I use the big hides like this one for the ASFs who like to pile up on top of each other.



I hope you enjoyed the photos and hopefully you got some helpful hints!

[Fraido]

Cool. It's always nice to see someone putting a little more time into their rodents! Rats are really awesome, to be honest, I've got 10 or 11 that are pets.

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[PitOnTheProwl]

Good looking set-up.
I remember using tanks and it was a pain in the butt.

[Oxylepy]

I wonder about the corn. I've heard that fungus on it can be an issue.

[cchardwick]

I know tanks are a bit more work but I do enjoy watching them. I like to watch to see if there are any issues with aggression too and take care of that right away. Can't really do that in a rack system. I may try a small rack system at some point to see how it compares to tanks, maybe once I expand my operation. I used to clean and bleach everything every week, boy was that a pain. Now I just do that once a month and every week just replace the bedding, that's so much easier. It's also easier with sliding tops on critter cages compared to other tops.