First litter, all dead in one day

[cchardwick]

When I first started breeding mice the first batch ate all their babies and some people on this forum said to cull them all. I never had a problem with batches after that with those mice. I also started separating all my mice in male / female pairs, that seems to work the best. For all my rats I've been separating females and that works pretty good, not really any losses with babies, but it takes up a lot of space and when I put them back in with other rats there is fighting for a day and a 'bad attitude' for a few days until they get used to each other again. Now I'm trying a harem approach with one male and three females, we will see how things go, but my production should be through the roof with that approach. If I have problems I may try cutting back to one male and two females or just a male female pair.

Another thing I've been doing with my mice is changing out their hides all the time, I use a 'snake cave' when they are ready to have babies. It works fantastic because it contains all the babies and keeps them from getting lost in the substrate. They used to get lost all over the place and would die because the mom couldn't find them. When they start to open their eyes I switch up the hide to a walk out cave so they can go out and find the food and start eating on their own as early as possible so I can wean them sooner. When I clean cages every week I go through and change out the hides. These hides are way to small for rats but maybe you can come up with something similar. Also, I'd probably keep the substrate to a minimum, like an inch or so. I used to keep it thick in my rat tanks and sometimes they would dig down into it and accidently bury all the babies.

Also, if you double your collection you'll need a lot of rodents. Do you plan on breeding? If so you will want to feed most twice a week, that's about 80 rodents a month for a collection of 20 snakes!

I use something like this to contain all the babies when they give birth and up to when their eyes are open, probably too small for a rat but works great for mice:



I use this hide for babies that open their eyes. I also have a bigger size hide and use those for my large batches of babies as they grow:


I also use glass 'critter cages', sort of like an aquarium with a screen top. I really like them, especially since I can see what is going on with all my rodents with just a quick glance around the room, if any are fighting, sick, dead, etc. Kind of a pain to clean and pretty heavy for the big ones but I don't think I'd go to anything else at this point.