Just thought I'd post this thread as a bit of a warning. We've never had megacolon in our rat colony and have had 100's of rats born here. Awhile back we got a female rat from a pet store who turned out to be preggers by some unknown pet store male. She produced this very cute male offspring who our son named "Lightning" and we subsequently kept as a future breeder male. There was some concern re his facial markings and the possibility of megacolon associated with some blaze faced rats.

(pic of Lightning when he was a little pup/weanling)....


Lightning recently fathered three litters. In one litter a megacolon baby was born and it was sad and awful. That young rat was put down to end it's suffering immediately. Lightning will be retired and paired with another nice tempered young male who is his son and will soon be weaned, to become Mikey's new pet rats. It may be that Lighting could go on and breed more and produce only the occasional megacolon baby but I just can't risk that for the sake of the colony and the risk of sickly, suffering young rats.

Just a caution folks to watch these blaze faced ones, especially ones like Lightning. I really should have listened to Becky's warnings about this but we'd gone so long with never a sign of megacolon that I guess I just got over-confident but since Lightning came from an unknown male I should have been more careful.