Quote Originally Posted by frankykeno
I know Joe, it's very odd. I've never seen this before. These were perfectly normal pinks, perfectly normal fuzzies and all alive yesterday. Today I go to feed and 1/2 the litter is dead...some still warm. The only "clues" seem to be that Alita has been acting freaky, highly nervous and not as glued to her litter as she normally is...obviously not nursing as much as usual, her teats are actually not even visible as they should be on a female rat nursing 10 offspring. The ones that died and were buried deep in the bedding were the smaller ones, only the larger ones survived.

I think this is a case of Alita being older than I know (remember I found her as a hugely pregnant adult female in a pet store bin full of adult male rats) so I've no real idea of her age. I think she went dry or was going dry which would explain her rejecting part of her litter for the ones that perhaps were more hardy. I'm not sure how the dead ones actually died, there are no teeth marks on them, they are not starved looking, they look to be healthy sleeping fuzzies, but of course are not. They simply seem to have been smothered or something like that. Every single one was buried as deep as she could put them and placed away from the living ones. I'm going to keep a very close eye on the surviving fuzzies and see if they do okay with the foster female and her fuzzies.
I bet thats what happened then. If the teats were barely visible then she closed up producing milk. To bad you did not discover this in enough time to save them all . I guess thats nature.