Pregnant mouse hates the maternity tub?

[cchardwick]

Welcome to the wonderful world of mice! I've been switching up my mouse setup for awhile and have done just about everything once (or twice). First, I found that pine bedding is really bad for mice, you should use Aspen bedding, or better yet use shredded paper from a paper shredder (free bedding). Pine will give mice liver damage and can kill rats. I was throwing out a dead rat every day until I figured it out.

Your tub seems too small for even one mouse, I'd use a minimum of a 10 gallon tank (use Velcro on the water bottle on the inside of the aquarium). And a litter size of six is super small, my litters are 15-19 babies most times. I used to separate the males and females and keep all the females separated but I finally ended up with three colonies of one male and 3-5 females. I keep them together all the time. The moms pile up the babies and lay spread eagle on the mound of baby mice to nurse them all, and the moms take turns. When the babies start maturing I separate them into four 10 gallon aquariums, two for males and two for females (feeder tanks, not all are full all the time). If I get an overabundance of mice I'll feed 3-4 small mice per snake in one feeding, or sometimes I'll feed off all the males in the breeder tanks and let the babies mature as replacement males, pretty much stops production for that tank until the baby male grows up.

I also put carbon filter pads on the top of the tanks (I use glass critter cages with screen tops) and tape the filter pads on with packing tape. That keeps the mouse smell to zero! In fact you wouldn't even know I have mice in the room even after 7 days of not cleaning with probably a hundred mice in the tanks. Without the carbon pads one male mouse will smell up the whole room. Rats don't smell nearly as bad as mice.

As far as babies dying you may have really old mice or really young mice. I found that young mice will sometimes eat the young, sometimes several litters will be cannibalized. But if you have patience they will mature and raise up a few batches of babies and get the hang of it and eventually produce without any problems. If your mice are full size and old you may want to raise up some babies as replacements. Mice are too old to breed after 8 months and need frequent replacing. Their life span is about 12 months.

Also, I found that it's better to fill half the bottom of the tank with balled up newspaper, gives the mice something to chew on and shred and creates small micro habitats that the mice can claim and keeps them separated into their own territory with no fighting at all. Only mature males usually fight and only if there are females in the tank (only keep one adult male per breeding tank). Also, never put new adult mice into a tank with other adult mice, they can fight to the death. The only way to combine mice from different colonies is if they are all young just weaned, mature mice are very territorial. That's the advantage of colony breeding, all the babies get along and are raised together. I usually never mix batches of babies from different tanks, that's why I have four feeder tanks to keep them separate as they come out of the breeder tanks. You know it's time to separate the babies if you have fighting between the males. The males will stop fighting if they are all put together in a tank without the females. I have a room full of mice and rats, they make no noise at all. If they make noise then something is wrong and someone needs to be separated!