How big of a colony would I need?

[monkeywrench133]

Hi everyone, I'm thinking about starting to breed rats. In everyone's experience, how many breeders would I need to supply 6 large rats per week?

[Shelby]

I am no good with this kind of math stuff, but I'll tell you that you can expect a female rat to give you anywhere from 10-15 babies every month if she is always kept with the male. A rat takes around 6 months to reach full size, but 'large' rats are sometimes not full grown. A full grown one is usually classified as 'jumbo'. I'd give males probably 4 months to reach 'large' status.

[daniel1983]

The thing with rodents is.....the longer you keep them...the more money they cost to feed and the more space they take up....

If you want to turn over at least 6 adult rats a week.....lets do some calculations

Days needed for gestation = around 22 days
Days until weaned = around 22-25 days
Days until medium-large size is reached = around 40-60 days

So that is around 44-48 days until a female will be available to breed again because she is either pregnant or nursing. In order to produce around 6+ rats a week, you would need to have around 1 litter every week maybe 1 every two weeks if you have good producers. If a female is not available for 40-45 days (around 7 weeks), I would go with around 8-9 females. If you dont have enough babies...get some more females....if you have too many babies, feed some of the breeders.

You would need a place to house all the breeder and the babies once they are weaned.

[monkeywrench133]

So, starting out with a breeding pair, in 4-6 months, I'd be up to my eyeballs in Jumbos?

10-15 babies a MONTH? Really?

Edit---------OOps, Daniel, you and I must have been typing at the same time.

[Shelby]

Rodents breed like crazy. Albino rats typically are more prolific than the fancy rats.

40 day old rats aren't large by my standards.. they've only been weaned for about 10 days at that age. I call them medium at 2-3 months. Large 4-6. But maybe I just have slow growers, I don't know...

[monkeywrench133]

So, I'd need 8 or 10 tubs, one for each female with litter, and just rotate the male?

Albino rats? aka Lab rats?

[daniel1983]

Rodents breed like crazy. Albino rats typically are more prolific than the fancy rats.

40 day old rats aren't large by my standards.. they've only been weaned for about 10 days at that age. I call them medium at 2-3 months. Large 4-6. But maybe I just have slow growers, I don't know...

I am not much of a rat person, so I just used the avg. days that RodentPro provided for their sizes for a timeline....

....I had my schedule and production worked out perfect with my mice.

....but now I deal with all frozen, too many mouths to feed, and too little of an apartment to be breeding mice

[daniel1983]

So, I'd need 8 or 10 tubs, one for each female with litter, and just rotate the male?

Albino rats? aka Lab rats?

You would need more tubs than that....if you take out a 6-15 litter out of the mother's enclosure after they are weaned you will need a place to put them for 20-40 days until they reach large size....with a litter a week, I would get around 15-17 tubs.

EDIT: ......maybe a litter every two weeks is much better.....you would be producing a lot of babies with that many females.....I was assuming worst case litters....but if you have a bunch of really large litters you will be overrun.....ha ha...that happened to me a few times with my mice....but thats what we have freezers for right?

[Shelby]

I wonder what rodent pro feeds their rats. lol

Erin, I'll just tell you what I do. It may or may not be the best way, but it works for me and my 23 hungry scalekids. I keep one male to three females in large lab style cages. The females and male all stay together all the time. All the females help each other take care of their babies.. even the male will sometimes lay on them and keep them warm.

I wean babies at about a month, at which time males and females are separated out to their own grow out tubs.

[Smulkin]

The thing with rodents is.....the longer you keep them...the more money they cost to feed and the more space they take up....


You would need a place to house all the breeder and the babies once they are weaned.

Holds especially true when you are growing them to large sizes. In addition to seperate cages for weaning, and letting momrat recover some weight before putting her to breed again, you need to divy them up by sex or you will windup with rampant breeding.

At some point a couple of males who weren't eaten must have inadvertently been tossed back into the cages holding the females - the unintended litters are out of control.

The routines are daily and at that more work than caring for the snakes they feed but has been worth the effort for us.


(EDIT: HAH! S0000 so beaten by you guys while responding!)