Tracking?

[azmodane]

I know others have posted this with varying answers but what do people do for tracking their birthing rates or anything of that nature? What do you do to keep track of what females are producing and what females aren't? What do you do for your rat/rodent organization/record keeping if anything?
I wanted to keep everything organized but everything went chaotic and I am looking to try and get everything back under control. At this moment I just had tubs that they mate,birth, and wean in then I pull out the babies once they have weaned off and put in another tub till their sold. I soon hope to have birthing tubs but until then any tips/tricks would be appreciated.

[carlson]

I have a dry erase board that I write fast notes on and other stuff that's not too important or will be transferred to a note book that contains info on my snakes and on my rats (only had one litter so far but have like eight males and one female, looking for females to add in with my boys but I'm picky.) and then under every tank is a index card that had basic info who's in the tank what I believe their coloring and genes to be and when the girl had the litter how many in it now many survived what coloring the babies had and ratio of males and females. I need a scale so my weights can start becoming part of it all. I prefer to keep hand written stuff over computer and because of my jobs I'm good at keeping accurate info organized and likely repeated in a couple spots.

[satomi325]

I use Microsoft Excel and cage cards.

I keep track of a few things:
- Basic info about all of my rats (age/type of rat/gender)
- Date and how old the female starts breeding.
- How many litters she's had and how many pups
- Pedigree of all my rats to avoid too much inbreeding.
- Date a particular female bred (and to which male), gave birth, and weaned her pups.

[sorraia]

I bred rats as pets and kept track of all kinds of information in multiple spreadsheets, but for feeder purposes you probably don't need to be that in depth. I've seen "cage cards" for rabbits that would probably work well enough. Some examples of what you may consider keeping track of:

Sire and dam names
date of birth
number born
number survived
date weaned

If you are interested in a bit more information, also record the sire and dam's birth dates on the litter card, and how many litters each has produced. This may be important in the long term as more experienced mothers tend to be better parents. In my experience as a breeder, slightly more mature inexperienced females (i.e. 6-8 months vs 4 months) were better mothers than younger inexperienced females.

If you are interested in colors as well, keep track of that. Consider adding not just the phenotype you see, but any known genetics as well. For example, if one parent was beige and the other was blue, you would know your black babies (assuming there were no other carried recessives in the mix) will be het for both colors (genotype a/a G/g R/r if you know the gene codes typically used for those colors).

For any records you keep, consider keeping at least a notes section where you can write down any issues you have. If, for example, a particular rat (either male or female) seems to have "defective" offspring in every litter (i.e. some neurological defect that results in dead pups within the first week), you might consider scrapping them from your breeding program. Depending on how long you are keeping babies and how many others you keep for future breeders, you'll want to know about issues that occur later too (i.e. at weaning up until you feed them off).

It really depends on how in depth you want to get.

[azmodane]

Thanks so much for the tips, I appreciate every single one. I think I may need to switch around the way I do my breeding at least for a little bit to get my records straight.