So much for Heat Resistant Mice

[Sasheena]

Well it happened. I must be cursed!

Today had to be one of the longest days in creation. Started at 4:30 when everyone woke up to take my stepdaughter to the airport. She had a 7 am flight, and the airport is an hour away.

Dropped her off, then went and had breakfast, then went Hot Tub shopping (now THAT was fun).

After the Hot Tub shopping, me and my other stepdaughter went and saw War of the Worlds, while Hubby and stepson saw Batman Begins. Then some more Hot Tub Shopping, and by 5 pm (12 hours after we left the house) we made the plunge (pun intended) and got ourselves a hot tub. Finally, after dinner, 14 hours after we left the house, we returned home.

Sometime in the day (+110* today) the power went off at our house. My "mouse house" AC is dumb and doesn't know how to come back on after an interruption of power. And I didn't notice that the power had been off until I'd been home for over an hour. When I did notice I freaked out! My poor critters!

First whiff on opening the mouse house seemed fine.... no obviously decaying mouse bodies.... I glanced over to my special experimental group (in a 20 galllon long, as opposed to racks which require me to open them to check on the critters) ..... a whole bunch of dead white mice. EGADS!

The first ten of my 30 cages were filled with dead or dying mice. I put a brick in a critter keeper and filled it to just below the level of the brick with water and all the mice with a heartbeat were plunged into the lukewarm water... at least I could TRY to save a few!

When all was said and done I have maybe 15 out of 30 cages left, each of the remaining groups having suffered some deaths and some "staggering heat-struck mice".... several groups only had pinky mice left alive.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll have the chance to go through my mouse cages and figure out what I have left.... Luckily two or three of the mouse groups have fuzzies. My experience with this sort of thing is that the males who live are often either sterile or have low fertility rates, as well as the females.

All the "rescued" mice that were sick of the heat were eventually put in my large experimental tank. I saved about twenty mice that way and will probably lose about 5 of those still.

Some of my most specific losses:

My one-eared-mouse lived, as did her ultra cute sister... but sadly her brother, a very robust and healthy little boy, did not make it. I will have to find an unrelated mouse to breed her to. (I had hoped to determine if the one-earedness was genetic or a birthing accident)

My curly tailed mouse was one of my "rescues" and I still haven't figured out if he's one of the ones who made it or did not. He didn't look good though, so I think it is not likely he will make it.

I had 4 groups of black eyed white mice, and had hoped to see if any of those groups would breed true. Alas, I think I saved three BEW mice out of the 30 or so I had.

While my mice are heat resistant, I am not surprised when they started dropping dead in 120* weather (as it probably was inside the mouse house). Poor little critters. It's always so heartbreaking. Especially as it seemed apparant that most of them had "given up the ghost" only within the twenty or so minutes before I discovered them. (All were limber and without any sort of "rigor mortis" which means they'd just died.) Of course the upside is that now that I've had such a ferocious loss, I'll not want to sell or feed off any of my mice.... but I felt able to freeze all the heat-killed mice as they were freshly dead, and so I have a sudden large supply of adult mice!

Tomorrow I'll know the final toll.... hopefully it's not too bad.

Too many things to happen in one day. I opted out of going out with hubby and kids to the fireworks displays .... just don't have the energy to do so!

Anyway, thought I would share with all of you.

I'll have to see if our other AC unit does the same thing... if it doesn't shut down and stay off after a power outage, then it's worthwhile getting hubby to switch it with the one currently in the mouse house.

[ReavenFeathers]

Yyeaaoouuccchh! :eek1: What a loss! Might be time to :-poke: your hubby for a new AC instead maybe? :shrugs:

But darn. Sorry for the losses Sasheena :cry: Hope all will look better tomorrow.

[DAND]

Generator time? I keep putting off getting one myself. Your problems are heat in the summer while mine is cold in the winter. Either way power failures cause grief. :( Sorry to hear you lost so many.

[princess]

Sasheena, you deserve some serious luck after all the dramas you've put up with in the last years. I'm sorry to hear about your losses. Perhaps some of the funds from the academic papers might go towards a generator for next summer so that if the power goes off again you won't lose the mice (or snakes even). I hope your luck turns around soon... :eek1:

[~slither~]

Hi again sasheena, more curiosity from me. At what temp (lowest and highest) will a corn have the same unfortunate fate as some of your mice.:shrugs: Theres no worry of it here in England, but as they say, 'if you don't ask, you'll never know'. And I don't agree with the saying, 'curiosity killed the cat'. Any ideas?

[~slither~]

And I forgot to add it before, sorry to hear about your loss.

[Taceas]

Sorry to hear about your mice, again. I can't imagine living in a location where the temps frequently flirt with those high of a temp and the electricity goes out, let alone trying to raise mice in such a location.

A 'hot tub' in Arizona? Please tell me thats a typo. ;)

I think perhaps that $2,000+ could have gone to fund an automatic generator for the property. I saw them at Lowe's and man do they look nice.

I guess I'm lucky that if our power ever went off around here and that meant no life-saving AC, everything would be in the basement where its nearly always 70*.

[Sasheena]

Yup a hot tub. :) (Hubby had an unfortunate 'run in' with a car when he was a youth.... nearly took his leg off, as he nears fifty he has been having seriously increased circulation issues with his leg that could, without some outside stimulation like a hot tub can provide, result in the loss of his leg, so it's a small price to pay to keep two legs!)

As far as the temperatures that a snake can withstand... if I'd had snakes in the "mouse house" yesterday when we were gone all day, and they didn't have water, they would have been dead. if they had a large enough water dish they could have survived by remaining nearly fully submerged. BUT (on reflection) I doubt they would have lived if they were anywhere above ground level. I say this because the water in the water bottles at the top of my mouse rack was very warm to the touch, which means it was probably 90* or higher, if not in the 100's. The good thing is that I did NOT have any of my reptiles in my mouse house.

The local "handy man" guy says that for around $40 I can get a Universal Power Supply thingie that will keep power to my AC unit in the event of a power outage, at least up to 45 minutes or an hour. If I'd had one of those yesterday I would never have had any losses. So I plan on investing in one of those things in the near future.

The most sad part of the entire thing is the loss of my "experimental" mice. Especially my little curly tail (yep, I tried to revive him, but his heat stroke was too extreme, and he didn't make it through the night). Today when I get home from "work" I'll go out and clean mouse cages. They're normally not cleaned until the weekend, but it's the best way for me to figure out exactly what is going on with the animals. I'll figure out how many viable breeding units I have, and I'll set up all my "rescues" from yesterday back into breeding groups. I'll probably have many groups without males to service the females. Pregnant females are first to die in extreme heat, followed by the males. This means that sometime soon I might have to invest in a few male mice from the petstore or a feed store. But in general these things turn out okay. It was just a bummer that I was gone for the whole day and the power outage happened earlier in the day.

I at least get some satisfaction that the 100 or so mice that perished were all "freezable" or "feedable" for later consumption by the snakes, and the similar number of pinkies and fuzzies that had no parent mice were likewise freezable. At least it wasn't a complete loss. They'll feed my snakes while I jealously keep nearly all babies born so they can grow up and become breeders instead of feeders. And I'm very lucky in that I have enough frozen newborn pinkies to tide me over for at least a month or two of feeding newhatched snakes... by the time I run out of pinkies, I should either have found new homes for my hatchlings, or will have new litters being born.

In any case, I thought I would share with everyone the continuing sagas of Sasheena VS the AC Failure!

[Sasheena]

I thought I would post an update on my mouse situation...

When I went and "sorted" my mice right after the disaster, I ended up with 11 strong viable breeding groups, and one possibly viable (the male was tiny). I also had a similar number of non-viable breeding groups. Females with babies, or that I had hopes would have a good litter still but for whom I have no males.

I was actually shocked to see that two of my females had litters within four days of the disaster... viable litters! (it's that heat resistance!)

A week after the disaster I cleaned out the cages (yesterday) and was pleasantly surprised that of my surviving hopper mice I had enough mice to begin a further 12 breeding groups! And a lot of the mice that survived are of my best stock.

So even thoiugh I had a disaster, the mice are already filling in the missing gaps.

The hardest part, of course, was going off to the Grand Canyon.... afraid that the power would go out and the AC would turn off. In the end my fears were groundless, bu I have to say I came VERY close to stopping on the way home and buying a dozen mice, just in case!

[Joni Garcia]

Glad to hear some good news about your mice! I was wondering how things were going. Sounds like it's working out better than you'd thought it might. I can imagine it would be hard to leave wondering if the same thing was going to happen again.

[~slither~]

Good to hear your colonies are not totally devastated.
Look at my sig. I've got 2 new rodent friends! I may be asking your advice on something or other pretty soon Sasheena. :)

[Sasheena]

Rodentia... bizarre critters

I captured a couple of wild ones too (one of whom shows many signs of domestic mouse influence) and threw them in one of my weaner bins. They were hanging out in my grain bag chowing down on sunflower seeds. Silly critters.

And any time you have a question about rodents I'll answer as best I can.

[~slither~]

Lol, I used to have a pet WC mouse. Had him for about 2 weeks, even got him pretty tame, he'd got no problem being in someones hand. Silly me used cloth as a lid to the glass tank and he decided he'd had enough and was going. 3 days it took me to find him. He was even in my bed one night, he darted when I woke up though. After that I decided to let him go.

[tat2d1]

:-offtopic You should have went to see Batman Begins. that movie is awesome,IMO (seen it 3 times so far).


sorry you lost all those mice, that's gotta suck. atleast you were able to get some of them to the freezer, so it's not a complete loss.

[kathylove]

Sorry to hear about your mice. We gave up on the a/c this year - the mouse ammonia eats the coils up too quickly, and the a/c always dies on a day that we are not here, or not working out in the building. Most summer days here are in the low or mid 90s. We are using lots of fans in the mouse room, which keeps them alive, but not producing much.

A new a/c problem is that all of the new, bigger window units are electronic now. Where we live, the electricity constantly goes on and off (for just a few seconds, usually) during our summer storms. The electronic units won't come back on by themselves, and we can't put them on timers, either. What a waste! So I am afraid to replace the a/c in the adult snake room because I don't go out there after every electric interruption - sometimes I don't even know about them.

I am surprised to hear that they make a UPS unit that is strong enough to keep an a/c going. I will have to check on that. If any other electrician types out there have other ideas, I would like to hear them.

In your dry climate, would a big evaporative cooler do enough to keep your mice going? What about using one of those AND a small a/c too?

[JM :o)]

I'm in Southern CA, it gets pretty darned hot here! 95F easy, over a 100F most days in summer. I use a little portable swamp cooler in the mouse house. On the hottest days it can keep the mouse house approx 15 degree below the outside temp. Not great, but better on the electric bill, comes back on after power outages, and does good enough.

On the down side~ I have to fill it every day with water (you could probably set up an auto fill with a float though) and all that humidity in there makes the mice REALLY STINK FAST!!!!

[DdotSpot]

Rodentia... bizarre critters

I captured a couple of wild ones too (one of whom shows many signs of domestic mouse influence) and threw them in one of my weaner bins.

Just curious what you keep in your "Weaner bins". Do you keep the moms in there with them? Or are these the mice who have JUST been weaned. Is this the best time to introduce new mice into a colony?

[Sasheena]

Well the maintenance guy at school seemed to believe that a UPS could sustain the AC through a short outage. I still haven't made any effort to find out about it.

Stupid AC's not going back on after an outage though, that's really a bother.

As far as having a swamp cooler, I haven't thought about that. It's only a tiny building, 8 feet by 12 feet, hubby had to saw a hole in the side of the building for a window AC unit. It would be difficult to have both AC and swamp cooler, and on 115* days (which we get a lot of out here) I don't know that a swamp cooler would do the job as well as an AC

Perhaps I should set up a fan so that at the least I will have a backup if/when the power goes out.

We've got the electricians over as I'm typing this. Setting up the electricity for our new hot tub... they said it would be $200 to hard wire my mouse house, so later this year we might do that. At the present we have an extension cord running from the house to the outbuilding so it can have light and AC.

As far as "Weaner Bins" ... what I usually do is have two running at one time. Sometimes three. If I have two running I have a boy bin and a girl bin, if I have three running, I have a boy bin, a girl bin, and a young'un bin. Normally I leave the babies in with the parent mice until their ears and tails look just like an adult mouse... thin ears and tails. Babies that aren't ready to leave their mother have thicker ears and fatter tails. Once their ears and tails show they're "young adults" they can go into the boy and girl bins. Sometimes, for whatever reason, a group of not-quite-weaning age mice end up in the young'un bin... usually with at least one nursing mother, if not two. Sometimes I do this when I want to set up new colonies, when I've had mother mice die and leave behind a lot of babies... I set up a young'un bin with a few nursing moms, and the majority of the young pre-weaned babies make it to adulthood.

Luckily the darn things reproduce like mad. This year they're reproducing better/faster than I have ever seen them go in this kind of weather! Having lost 75% of my mice I thought it would be a while before I was "up to speed" but I'm already starting to worry about over-population of my mouse house. Of course as my babies keep hatching (kingsnakes) I don't think it will really be a problem. (I have a clutch of 14 king eggs hatching, and three other clutches due to start hatching in the next three or four days!