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Inbreeding Mice

P

Porky

PORK CHOP!!!!
What are the risks? I will be taking them as pinks or fuzzies and raising 1 or 2 up every 3 litters or so.
 
Broad range of potential problems, could be things like reduced litter size, physical abnormalities, blindness....who knows...

Remember that if you take all of a females litter away she will be full of milk and it'll be painful for her to be engorged, so perhaps remove 2 at a time every 2 days to help her out.
 
princess said:
Broad range of potential problems, could be things like reduced litter size, physical abnormalities, blindness....who knows...

Remember that if you take all of a females litter away she will be full of milk and it'll be painful for her to be engorged, so perhaps remove 2 at a time every 2 days to help her out.
Click to expand...
I wanted to start out with 1 male an 2 females and take some of their litter to breed with the father. Would that be a problem? I want to get 2 seperate blood lones from petsmart and the some females from petco. What do I have to do if I want to change out the females after 4-5 litters?
 
It's best to leave established colonies as they are to prevent stress and canibalisation of the babies, bullying, etc. If you want to ad a female from time to time, let a couple of babies grow up to be adults and perhaps remove an older female to prevent overcrowding. It's more than likely that the mice you buy from the pet shop are inbred in the first place.
 
Inbreeding is not 'good' but inbreeding to some extent is used in just about all animals to isolate and reproduce desireable traits...the unfortunate side effect is that the undesireable traits also get passed on and amplified.
 
princess said:
Broad range of potential problems, could be things like reduced litter size, physical abnormalities, blindness....who knows....
Click to expand...
I realize that we are talking about pet shop mice. However, lab mice have been inbred intentionally for centuries. The whole idea behind "lab" mice is for each specimen to be identical thus during testing there in a control. I have had only two visual physical abnormalities this year among roughly 5,000 produced offspring. One pinks hind legs were not properly formed, just nubs and the other had a stub tail.

princess said:
Remember that if you take all of a females litter away she will be full of milk and it'll be painful for her to be engorged, so perhaps remove 2 at a time every 2 days to help her out.
Click to expand...
I have to disagree here. I almost always pull entire litters all at once. Never had a problem.

Q
 
my experience

When it comes to raising up breeders, if you pull all except two, the mother might respond by drying up her milk, completely. I do best when raising up future breeders to leave at least four, preferably six. This way you also have a choice out of the babies raised up who to keep. You can't always tell poor doers in the pinky or fuzzy stage. And to respond to an earlier post, I also pull whole litters of babies, and have never noticed a problem.
 
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