2 litters in one tub bad idea?

[OctagonGecko729]

weaning is at about 3 weeks? and then i move them to their own tub. the question I have about that is what do you do when the females in the juvi tub start getting pregnant? do you move them over to old tub or just keep making new juvi tubs?

Here is my process. I have all of the morphs that are available. I currently run two 1.3 groups. I set up the adult breeders so I always have an idea of who the babies belong to in the bin. So an example would be: Amber "pied" male, amber "pied female", "pied" female, and agouti female. If you read up on the morphs and watch your tubs this makes it much easier to keep track of lineage.

So, for your question. I wean them off their mothers at 21-25 days to allow the newborn pinks free access to their mothers. The weaned rats get separated by sex into a large bin which houses either males or females.


When I'm looking to start up a new breeding group I pay a lot more attention to the animals to figure out temperament and health. Then I try to find the desired temperament and health in the morphs that would allow me to setup the new breeders like I stated above. There are many different combos of morphs you can use in the adults to identify lineage by the morph of offspring. Once I have found my desired breeder group I put them together rather young. It usually helps cut down on fighting and if the male is larger then the females he usually gets picked on less.

We have had a lot of issues with our original group around aggression, cannabilism, culling for no apparent reason, and (really disturbing) our original females began chewing off the right ears of their offspring. The last one developed late and was really disturbing because they seemed to have a methodology of abusing the young. It wasn't long after that until they culled several fully grown hoppers. I was already in the process of shutting down the group so that was the last straw for me and I fed off the females.

The original groups offspring was selected and paired up as half siblings. We took a lot of time out to pet them while they were young. So far it has worked out very well. They are on litter 4 now and I have only seen them cannabalize one pink which probably died on its own anyway. The aggression is completely gone, we can fool around with their pinks and fuzzies without them attacking us. They can be handled as well.

So the plan is to just keep up what we are doing and hopefully progress forward on temperament and birth counts.