Breeding for pre-weaned?

[JodanOrNoDan]

I was giving something some preliminary thought. I am willing to go ahead and do the research and run the numbers myself but I thought I may save myself a little time by asking those that are experienced if it is even worth my time to do the research. I am anticipating hatching approximately 50 ball pythons this season spread out over a couple months. Historically I have had problems sourcing live rats smaller than pups. I very rarely feed live other than babies who refuse FT for thier first meal. I have sometimes been forced to resort to mice which I really do not like to do. If my numbers hold true right around 33% of my babies have insisted that the first meal is live. Would it be worth it to keep a couple breeding female rats to supply me with the approprietely sized first meals? Can I control the birth rate and times of the rats good enough to meet these needs? I really do not like the smell of rats so keeping a colony is out of the question for me. I was guessing maybe two females and a male? Any excess production would be frozen before being weaned. I figure doing that would significantly keep the cost of raising the rats down and significantly reduce the number of pup and smaller rats that I am buying frozen if I continue the process year round. I typically sell most of my young snakes after they feed twice.


Thank you for any guidance

[predatorkeeper87]

I was giving something some preliminary thought. I am willing to go ahead and do the research and run the numbers myself but I thought I may save myself a little time by asking those that are experienced if it is even worth my time to do the research. I am anticipating hatching approximately 50 ball pythons this season spread out over a couple months. Historically I have had problems sourcing live rats smaller than pups. I very rarely feed live other than babies who refuse FT for thier first meal. I have sometimes been forced to resort to mice which I really do not like to do. If my numbers hold true right around 33% of my babies have insisted that the first meal is live. Would it be worth it to keep a couple breeding female rats to supply me with the approprietely sized first meals? Can I control the birth rate and times of the rats good enough to meet these needs? I really do not like the smell of rats so keeping a colony is out of the question for me. I was guessing maybe two females and a male? Any excess production would be frozen before being weaned. I figure doing that would significantly keep the cost of raising the rats down and significantly reduce the number of pup and smaller rats that I am buying frozen if I continue the process year round. I typically sell most of my young snakes after they feed twice.


Thank you for any guidance

That's doable, with a good trio you can expect between 20-30 babies. Gestation is roughly 24-28 days, and 5-5.5 weeks until they are weaned. You just need to time the hatches and the rat births, but definitely doable.

[rufretic]

With only two female rats, I think the hardest part is going to be getting lucky enough to have the timing right. If you had more females, it gives you better odds of having at least one of them having a litter in line with the time your hatchlings are ready to feed. Now of course this will only be an issue for the live feeders. It will definitely be a huge cost save though. Rats are super cheap to keep. I've only just started keeping a colony for maybe 2-3 months. I have 8 females and 2 males and I'm conservative on my living space, 4 tubs with 2 females per and then I rotate a male between each pair of tubs. It cost me less than $30 a month for bedding and food, but I do believe I get a little better pricing especially if you are going to get your supplies from a pet store.

If your going to do it, you'll want to start asap because it does take longer than I thought to get them settled in and breeding consistently, it was at least a month for me and my females were already breeders some pregnant when I got them. Had some issues in the beginning with babies getting eaten and mothers abandoning them. But now that they settled in and figured things out, wow do they produce a lot! My females are averaging 15 babies each time. I have over 50 babies ready to be weened between two tubs and the other two tubs are close to having theirs now, then I'll switch the males back to the other two tubs and so on. So if you start now, even with only two, you can start stocking up and freezing. Once you figure out how long your trio takes to have the size pups you want ready to go from the time you introduce the male, then you can pull the male and wait it out a little and reintroduce him at the time it lines up with your hatchlings. I don't think it will be easy because rats don't always cooperate how you want them to and you only will have two females to play with but it could be done and I would certainly think it would be worth it in the money you would save alone.

[Seven-Thirty]

Timing it would be hard and especially given that you do not like the smell of rats makes this a bit more difficult because even a 1.2 will start to smell, at least in my experience.

Personally what I would do is get a 1.1 of asfs due to smaller size, comprable nutritional profile, and they tend to stay in a somewhat manageable size for hatchlings for a long time. For example, my litter of 12 is around 4 weeks old and are smaller than the size of a rat pup but opened their eyes yesterday. Smell is still there but not as bad as mice or rats imo. It takes them about a month and a half after being weaned to hit, what i believe, the size of a weaned rat.

It's completely understandable why you wouldn't want to use asfs though. The main problem people have when breeding their own rats is having the right size of rat when you need it which is why there is always a huge amount of rats in operations to cover all their bases of size.

Another thing you can do with the rat route is feeding off/freezing the offspring once they open their eyes. That way you have weaned sized rats to feed off when you don't have hatchlings to feed, control population, and cut down on costs because it takes much more financially to raise rats past weanling/small size.

[Stewart_Reptiles]

2 females and a male will not get you far. It will get you 12 to 24 babies on average 5 weeks later your females can get back in rotation to produce another 12 to 24 babies 3 to 4 weeks later.

If you keep the females together with the male at all time back to back breeding will where them out, smaller litters, smaller babies (obviously being regnant and nursing at the same time takes it's toll pretty fast)

Average production is 6 to 12 (some do good some not so much and you only find out when they start producing), what you need to figure when pairing is that your females will be going through breeding/gestation/nursing, if you need crawlers to pups, we talking at least 5 weeks for the all process for each females so if you want to produce consistently on a weekly basis and have to feed 50 babies you need to take that into account.

That mean to produce 50 rats each week you will need at least 5 females to produce babies for you each week. (even that could be a little short depending on the females)

Now while I used to start everything on rats I don't anymore, mice is more enticing and the success rate of first feed first time offered is higher on mice (they are switch however after 2 meals)

As a general rule I have 1 female rat for every snake for the perfect rotation. Seems like a lot but those are realistic numbers long term.

Now if you only intend to produce for 2 weeks before the snakes are gone I would not go through that trouble, I would find an alternative solution.

[JodanOrNoDan]

Timing it would be hard and especially given that you do not like the smell of rats makes this a bit more difficult because even a 1.2 will start to smell, at least in my experience.

Personally what I would do is get a 1.1 of asfs due to smaller size, comprable nutritional profile, and they tend to stay in a somewhat manageable size for hatchlings for a long time. For example, my litter of 12 is around 4 weeks old and are smaller than the size of a rat pup but opened their eyes yesterday. Smell is still there but not as bad as mice or rats imo. It takes them about a month and a half after being weaned to hit, what i believe, the size of a weaned rat.

It's completely understandable why you wouldn't want to use asfs though. The main problem people have when breeding their own rats is having the right size of rat when you need it which is why there is always a huge amount of rats in operations to cover all their bases of size.

Another thing you can do with the rat route is feeding off/freezing the offspring once they open their eyes. That way you have weaned sized rats to feed off when you don't have hatchlings to feed, control population, and cut down on costs because it takes much more financially to raise rats past weanling/small size.

You are pretty much on to what I want to attempt with the exception of the asf. If I was not selling animals asf would be an option. I know for me at least when I hear animals have been being fed ASF they are a no-go for me. The availability is just not there.

[JodanOrNoDan]

2 females and a male will not get you far. It will get you 12 to 24 babies on average 5 weeks later your females can get back in rotation to produce another 12 to 24 babies 3 to 4 weeks later.

If you keep the females together with the male at all time back to back breeding will where them out, smaller litters, smaller babies (obviously being regnant and nursing at the same time takes it's toll pretty fast)

Average production is 6 to 12 (some do good some not so much and you only find out when they start producing), what you need to figure when pairing is that your females will be going through breeding/gestation/nursing, if you need crawlers to pups, we talking at least 5 weeks for the all process for each females so if you want to produce consistently on a weekly basis and have to feed 50 babies you need to take that into account.

That mean to produce 50 rats each week you will need at least 5 females to produce babies for you each week. (even that could be a little short depending on the females)

Now while I used to start everything on rats I don't anymore, mice is more enticing and the success rate of first feed first time offered is higher on mice (they are switch however after 2 meals)

As a general rule I have 1 female rat for every snake for the perfect rotation. Seems like a lot but those are realistic numbers long term.

Now if you only intend to produce for 2 weeks before the snakes are gone I would not go through that trouble, I would find an alternative solution.

Thanks for the detailed breakdown. Three rats I could deal with. Six is in the questionable range. The biggest reason I am even thinking about doing it is the availability issue with getting the smaller rats. I am talking to some local people trying to get something lined up but no luck so far. I can get live mice at the right size, but I like to get them on rats before going out the door (should I be that concerned about this?). I have so far always been able to switch babies over but should I even bother?

[Stewart_Reptiles]

Thanks for the detailed breakdown. Three rats I could deal with. Six is in the questionable range. The biggest reason I am even thinking about doing it is the availability issue with getting the smaller rats. I am talking to some local people trying to get something lined up but no luck so far. I can get live mice at the right size, but I like to get them on rats before going out the door (should I be that concerned about this?). I have so far always been able to switch babies over but should I even bother?

It is definitely a problem even if you doing 6 just to produced back to back they would still be space out 3 weeks apart.

As far as switching many breeder sell animals feeding on mice, I can tell you that I have never had an issue swithing to rats with BP especially when they are young and voracious so the new owner should not have issue, neither should you.

The rodent part is always difficult trust me I am not fan of breeding those but being able to rely on someone else can get tricky depending on a where you live.

Maybe you can find a just middle produce half of what you need and fingers someone for the rest.

Craigslist might be your best bet.

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[JodanOrNoDan]

I think I am going to try it at an extremely small scale just to see if I can put up with it. If I can't I won't have invested too much and can always feed the animals off. This is the first year that I am at least semi-serious about breeding the snakes. I am at the point that I can consistently produce stuff that is marketable and what I believe to be above average in quality. My statistically worst breeding has a 1/32 of producing a normal. The rat experiment will tell me if I can comfortably scale what I am doing. I believe Deborah is right about relying on others. I have been burned a couple times with people saying they had stuff and they didn't and coming up short. Even if I don't produce enough rats I will be better off than I am now and I guess I can always get live mice of the proper size to make up for shortfalls.

[rufretic]

I think I am going to try it at an extremely small scale just to see if I can put up with it. If I can't I won't have invested too much and can always feed the animals off. This is the first year that I am at least semi-serious about breeding the snakes. I am at the point that I can consistently produce stuff that is marketable and what I believe to be above average in quality. My statistically worst breeding has a 1/32 of producing a normal. The rat experiment will tell me if I can comfortably scale what I am doing. I believe Deborah is right about relying on others. I have been burned a couple times with people saying they had stuff and they didn't and coming up short. Even if I don't produce enough rats I will be better off than I am now and I guess I can always get live mice of the proper size to make up for shortfalls.

To be honest, my mind set was almost the exact same as yours, I do not like the smell of rodents and was completely against breeding them in my home because the few times I was anywhere near rodents breeding I couldn't imagine living with that smell in the house. Then I met a breeder that lives near me, he breeds fish, snakes, rats and now is even getting into gerbils and rabbits. The first time I was there I went for fish and did not even know he bred anything else(no rodent smell). The first time he took me into his snake room, also where he breeds his rats, I was shocked because the smell was almost non existent. Once I started increasing my snake collection I realized how expensive it was going to get feeding this many mouths. So like you I decided maybe I could get away with just a trio of rats without it bothering me. They did not smell up my house but I had a feeling they were not going to be enough. I already had more snakes so a week or two later I took the plunge and built a rat rack and decided to go for it. Now I have not been doing it for long but the smell is nothing like I thought it would be. I'm lucky to have a full unfinished basement that I can basically do what I want with it because I didn't want the rodents upstairs. I'm happy to say, there is absolutely no smell upstairs ever, my wife would not tolerate it and she would be the first to say, that's it get them out of here. But so far so good. If you don't have someplace like that where you can keep them away from your living quarters, you may have to deal with the smell occasionally. My basement does not have a sent typically but a day or two before it's time to change the bedding, I can smell it when I go down there. It's not bad though and is gone again a day after I do the bedding. The worst was the first week or two after getting the whole group when I think the males were marking I would guess. The tubs were more saturated and you could definitely smell it down there but after that, it has been really manageable. I think you might be surprised what you can get away with as long as you stay on top of maintenance. It might be worth giving it a shot with a few more rats than you were planning. The rack was cheap and easy to build and the cost of the rats doesn't really matter because if you change your mind you can feed them off, but it's not a big investment to try. Good luck with whatever you decide.