Rat litter advice

[Debbienflorida]

I have a first time mom with 10 babies. All have been healthy from day one. When I discovered the litter there were 10 and 3 weeks later there are still 10. In the last couple days at least 2 maybe 3 of the babies are a little skinnier than the rest. I have watched and most of the babies are eating "Becky's Rat mix" and the mom haqs been fed that and Mazuri blocks since a baby. I am wondering about my options, basically that would give all the babies and mom the best chance. The babies will be 3 weeks old this Sunday. If I seperate the majority of the babies and just leave the 2 or 3 "littlest" ones with her say 24 hours and give them all access to mom and the others the Rat mix and water will she take the babies back the next day? Should I leave them all together another week and hope for the best? The are too small at the moment to be fed off to any of my snakes. All 4 snakes are on rat pups. I would like to keep a couple females as there is some nice colors and I have a hard time sexing at this age. What would you do and why?

[Somed00d]

Rats are great with babies. you can put babies from different moms in and they will nurse them. I usually move the runts to another tub with similar sized rats but if thats not an option you could separate out the larger ones with no problems.

[truthsdeceit]

I had a similar problem with one of my mouse litters a week or so ago.

I left them alone and hoped for the best. It didn't work out. 2 days after I noticed the runt getting skinny I found her dead.

If I were you I'd seperate the healthly ones out for at least a few hours to give the runts a chance. The only reason I didn't do this was because my litter wasn't eating solids yet. If your rat babies are then I'd give it a shot.

Keep us posted, I'd like to hear how this turns out.

[marmie]

Are the runts really that small? A litter of 10 is pretty much normal and mom has 12 nipples.

You could try taking out the older babies during the day and return them during the night. At 3 weeks they are probably nibbling at the food so they should be fine for 8 hours or so.

Mama will be happy to see her babies so I don't think returning them 24 hours later will make a difference at all. I agree with Some00d, rats are great with babies.

[Drew87]

When i have moms that have that big of litters, after the first couple of days i just start to feed of the larger pups to my snakes that are still on pups. That way the runts have a chance