Looking for helpful tips for first time breeding!

[nikkubus]

If you are sticking to standard breeding season, starting conditioning in late Oct/early Nov, pairing starting in late Dec/Jan, realistically she would be around the 2 year mark when she actually lays. It's not common to breed them this early, but it's certainly not unheard of if she is in prime condition. You cannot just go by raw weight though. She has to lean, not overweight, and has to have the bone structure to support it. Even if she is in great condition, it's not advisable for a first time breeder. I'd give her one more year. The growth she will put on in that one year will more than make up for losing one season over the next couple years because she will be laying more eggs at a time. If you breed her this year, she has to invest next fall and winter into regaining her weight and won't grow that much more and will continue to have smaller clutches for some years.

1600g at 13 months is not unheard of, but it's pretty big pretty fast. Once you hit weaned-small rats, their metabolism changes and you are mostly putting on fat reserves instead of real gain if you continue 15%. She may just be extremely obese. I almost never feed medium+ rats to BPs except my largest females during conditioning in the height of their eating season. Fat/obese females have a hard time breeding and laying, and what may just seem like cutting minor corners to get results faster can actually be a huge setback.

Not sure if you ever bred any of the other species you have kept, but what BPs will sell and how fast is drastically different from some other species so make sure you have a backup plan if you can't sell as easy as you think. If you haven't bred at all, keep in mind that when clutches start hatching out and you get their first sheds, there is a strong increase in the amount of time required to keep up with them. Getting hatchlings stable on eating, especially BPs can be hard work. The amount of work I do in June-Aug is 10x more than the rest of the year. I can feed 30-40 adults in less than an hour. It can take 2 hrs to feed a single clutch of hatchlings sometimes and they need fed more often. I would caution you to do no more than 2-3 clutches your first season so you can get a feel for it and so that it's not as devastating if something goes wrong like an incubator failure or some minor error on setting up the clutches where you lose them all.

Now that that's all out of the way...

Other than proper husbandry, their isn't really a way to induce sperm plugs. When a male is mature, they just start producing sperm. If you meant how do you find sperm plugs, it's easy to see on their sheds, or you can gently pop them almost like pop sexing, and sperm plugs will come out.

Not sure quite what you meant by inducing ovulation. Ovulation is specifically the part of the breeding cycle where the female takes sperm reserves she is holding from breeding and actually fertilizes the follicles and they become eggs. As far as steps to getting this to happen, having the female in the best possible condition while pairing her and then pairing at good intervals for the correct amount of time and hoping for some good locks is about the best you can do. I try to get one good lock per month from Jan till ovulation. If I don't see a lock after 48 hrs, I pull the male and try again in a week or two.

If you meant how to induce her building follicles then the method I use is to condition them with seasonal temperature change, increased frequency of food, and pairing with the male with the schedule listed above.

I don't think anyone is specifically looking for problems to attack you, but we just see stuff like this go haywire for people and some red flags are present. We are only trying to check what's going on because we don't want you to go through the heartache many others have, and some of us have experienced personally. I've been doing this decades and things still go wrong sometimes because I make a mistake or some unfortunate coincidence happens.

Some people can acquire a huge amount of animals in a short period because of their circumstances and amount of research (Like Miguel from AEP) and it works out great but this is not the norm.