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marking keepers?

diamondlil

diamondlil

Mice! They taste so nice!
out of the 10 growing on mice in my colony I've chosen 3 patched females and a pink eyed white male who've grown fast and I want them for a new colony. At this stage, I can easily sex them by who's got nipples.
I find it harder when they grow a bit more fur, and wanted to grow them all on to hopper size before culling out the rest.
Any ideas on how to mark the ones I want to keep? 2 of the females are distinctive enough I'll recognise them, but the other looks just like 2 males I'm planning to cull, and the pink eyed white obviously has nothing different except he's a boy!
I know I could cull out the ones I don't want to keep now to avoid mistakes, but really wanted them another week bigger. Any ideas welcome, I was thinking of trying a non-toxic permanent marker pen?
 
I've only got the one colony of 1.3 at the moment so seperating the keepers out now would mean taking one of the breeding females out with them. I didn't really want to do that in case of trouble when I'd want to put the adult back into the original group.
Now I'm just imagining going into a stationary shop and asking which pens are good for marking mice safely
 
Thanks, I'll get some food colouring tomorrow. I don't mind if I have to reapply it a couple of times, it should be only a week until I cull the non-keepers out
 
Hmph! Thanks to the dedicated mouse-mothers, the food colouring didn't work out. They have had a cleaning session and now all the babies and the adults have faint blue markings all over from the food dye.
I've drawn out outlines of the mice I want to keep with their markings on. The pink-eyed white I don't want is noticably smalller than the one I do want, so hopefully I'll be able to keep the one I want at the end of the week
 
Oh no, sorry about that, I never thought about mom cleaning them. When I was a teen I had a pet rat I would dye with food coloring so I knew it was safe.

I'd just get a sharpie and mark the tail.
 
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