Quote Originally Posted by cchardwick View Post
I keep changing things up with my colony, right now my production is really good and I'm happy with my new system. I start by pairing up six females and one male in a grow out tub for breeding. Every weekend I pair up six females to keep a constant production going. It's actually pretty cramped in there but as each female becomes very pregnant I pull her out and put her in her own nursing tub to give birth. After a couple more weeks I'm just left with the male by himself and I actually feed him off to my retics LOL. Then when the female has babies with eyes open and running around I put two females and all their babies in grow out tubs. Once I feed off or sell all the babies I usually pair up more and more females until I get six per tub. Right now I have tubs of two and four and six females that had all babies removed. Then on the weekends I put six to a tub with one male and start over again.

Every week I drop a brand new breeder male in the tub with six females, using a new adult male every time gives me assurance that all females will get bred. I save all of my black rat males as breeders, seems that it's a pretty rare mutation and I don't get many pure black males, so my male breeder tubs usually have 2-3 black males at a time I'm growing up. Once I pull a male I'll drop in another smaller black male or two to keep it going. And every six months to a year or so I'll hold back my pure white females to raise up as breeders.

When I open a breeder tub I know the females are white and the males are black, no confusion at all. And I used to use hooded and random colored males and females, if I find a female that's not white I know she is old, same thing with my males, if they aren't black they are old. Sometimes I'll use a male more than once but they usually get big and old much faster than the females. I think it's better to keep females a bit older since they tend to have bigger litters. Females that are too old start dying when they give birth, then it's time to replace them all. Maybe on my next rotation I'll use hooded females as breeders and cull all the white ones. Makes keeping track of all my 50 tubs of rats much easier without writing it all down and keeping track. If I get too many babies all at once I'll pull about 20 females out for future breeders and raise them up and slowly replace the older ones.

I'm finding that my production is limited by the number of tubs I have. I have 20 nursing tubs so if I have six females per week that go into the tubs I have three weeks of females going in. I tried to pair nine females per week but I ran out of nursing tubs and they gave birth in groups in their grow out tubs. It seemed to work OK and my production went through the roof but things got really confusing, I decided to cull a lot and go back to six per week to keep my original system going.

Hope that helps!
Wow... It sounds like you have your system down to a science! That's a smart way to keep track of how old your females are. I've been wondering how to go about that... Do I understand correctly that you only breed each male 6 times then feed them off? At least they die happy, but i'm curious why you only breed them 6 times... Do male rats just stop breeding enough to keep up or become less fertile or something?

@cncmachineguy - It has been recommended to me that 1 female breeder per snake is ideal for keeping up with supply and demand. So, if you only have 4 snakes, 4 female rats and 1 male rat would probably be all you need. That sounds sooo much easier than what i'm heading into, which is still nothing compared to what cchardwick and a lot of these other guys have to keep up with! lol