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.
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