We really need a feeder rodent section..

[Taceas]

As many people post questions and theories about raising your own feeder mice, it'd only make sense to have their own area. After all, mice are just as important as the snakes in my opinion. =)

Ok anyway, back to my question at hand. I've currently got a nice close-knit breeding colong of 2:7 in a 20 gallon long aquarium. My adult female breeders range from 8 months to 4 months of age, my two males 8 month and 4 month as well. They're breeding like crazy and I don't want to break up a winning thing, don't get me wrong. But I'm concerned with the amount of inbreeding going on. It can't be good, and at what point in the successive generations of breeding brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, cousins, etc does is get awry? And another motivation is, white mice are just plain boring to look at. It probably helps with all of them being white because if they looked cute they'd have a lot less liklihood of being offered as food, but I'll take that risk as it comes up. =P

Yeah yeah, I know they're just feeder mice. But I want my feeder mice to be as healthy as possible, and part of that is their genetic diversity. I do cull the lesser quality ones (in my eye) and feed those, and leave the biggest and fastest growers for my younger generation breeders.

I'm wanting to get different genetic strains going, so my gene pool isn't stagnant and mosquito filled. I picked up a couple of great looking male pet mice. I figured the fastest way to add to the gene pool would be with males, as they can breed many, many females. They had just arrived at the store from a fancy mouse breeder, and were fat and healthy with no sign of distress or disease of any sort. I've currently got them quarantined from my other mice, just to make sure they're not harboring anything.

Upon them being smelled in the same room, my breeder mice females went nuts trying to find the offenders and bite them, and subsequently bit at the males living in their own tanks. So I can see I'm going to have some hostility. What is the best way to start a new colony? Is there any point in time or conditions that an adult female won't bully a new male? Like after having gave birth a week ago so she would be in estrus, or having his own cage for a while and adding her into his cage, or adding younger virgin females to his cage (something which I was going to do)?

I'm just looking for all of your methods and suggestions for spliting up a large colony, or just starting new ones with established females. Thanks in advance. =)

New Males: Ain't they cute? =P

 

[CornCrazy]

Awww...they are cute.

I have noticed that once a female colony is established, it can be much harder to add males to it. I was down to only having females, and wanted to start producing mice again. My females killed 3 males before they finally accepted one. It should not have anything to do with estrous, however. I learned in school that female mice which haven't been exposed to a male for a while, will come into estrous very quickly after a male is introduced to them. Supposedly, the male's scent stimulates estrous. I would suggest addin younger females to the males new males cage after the males have been there for a few days.

I also learned that it takes 20 generations of inbreeding before a mouse is considered to be part of an inbred strain. You may have some problems before that, but the genetics aren't set in a family of inbred mice until after 20 generations.

Good luck!

 

[moreptiles]

I learned the problem with adding the fancy mice to your colony the hard way. Fancy mice are bred for color and pattern, not production. When you add a fancy male to your colony, the first generation of mice will be normal production, because the number of babies is based on the female only, not the male. But then the next generations may have a lot less production. So instead of producing 12-15 pinkies per litter, you may end up with 6-8. I had to start over and get some new breeding stock.

Mark

 

[Sasheena]

Ah fancy mice! I just love my mice!

okay... lots of thoughts, so be prepared for a long message!

Okay, if you have a good group of mice going, best not to split them up, BUT, if you do want to split them up to get some good genes going, I would snag a female or two that are between litters and not really showing pregnancy. Leave each male in his own cage and let the cage get real stinky, then add the females. You'll hear a lot of squeaking, but unless you see blood, things should go okay. Best thing to do is take some juvenile females that are older than 5 weeks, and place them with the new males.

I agree, there definately should be a feeder forum here.

As far as inbreeding, in the first generation, you should not really notice anything awry, by the third to fifth generations you will notice "inbreeding depression" which is a term that the scientists use to denote that all the harmful recessives are working against your colony. By the ninth generation you will most likely have a line of mice that will not continue. It took scientists a long time to break the "unbreakable limitation" of inbreeding depression... it was thought for a long time that it was impossible to get an inbred strain of mice, since the deleterious genes start to become more and more apparant. But then they overcame that and there are a number of inbred mice. Inbred mice (I had a few strains I got from a lab out of curiousity) tend to have small litters, be bad parents, be more jumpy and smaller bodied, and generally are not that easy to perpetuate. The inbred mice I got (two strains) had a lot of troubles. One strain had deformed babies... exposed brain, no eyes, twisted legs, and never did a good job of raising their babies. Even when the babies were put in excellent foster homes they failed to thrive. The other strain did slightly better (but OH, they could BITE, and the babies were rocket propelled in their hopper stage) but they mostly only had male babies? Both groups of inbred mice were eventually bred into my fancy strains, and now I have some of the best producing mice... the hybrid vigour brought on by adding the inbred lines to my mice is excellent! If I was JUST raising feeders I would Never bother with inbred mice, nor try to fully inbreed my own lines.

I agree, pure white mice are boring. When I got the inbred mice, I also got some Swiss Webster mice and a single ICR mouse. The swissies never had more than 12 babies, compared with the 16 - 20 mice my fancies regularly had. Eventually I crossed the ICR and the Swiss, then crossed those offspring to my highest production line of fancy mice. Those mice are some of the most awesome mice I have! One of the crosses between the hybrid fancy/inbred mice, and the swiss/icr/fancy mice just had her second litter, again, just like her first litter, she had 19 babies. I think that fancy mice can be just as "super producing" as boring white lab mice, you just have to have perseverance. It's been 18 months that I've been perfecting my superproducing line. Of course due to the variety of genes available in my mice, some of these mice are coming up with dumbo ears, strange color patterns that are rare, curly hair, long haired, satin hair. VERY fancy mice. But mostly they do a great job making more mice!

I would agree that in general, if you have high production mice, crossing fancy mice with them will in most cases lower your production. In my situation, I took known high production fancy lines and crossed them to known high production lab lines. Some of my mice only have 12 or so babies, but most of them have more than 15.

 

[Taceas]

Well I've decided to go ahead and get started on new colonies in addition to the one I've already got. When that colony shows signs of age and a downhill progression of #'s of babies then I'll phase that one out. Hopefully by then the other colonies will have picked up and be self-perpetuating.

I plan on holding back some of the pinks I raise up for lg. fuzzies/hoppers and feed off the males and keep the females to add to my two new males cages. Luckily 2 of my mice gave birth yesterday and I have 33 pinks, so hopefully I will have enough females to add at once to the males, instead of one occcasionally down the road.

#'s of babies really doesn't matter at this point. At some times I have way too many to really use, and end up growing them up and supplementing my adult's diets of f/t with fresh killed.

I raise the mice primarily for pinks-crawlers. I've found my snakes do so much better with fresh prey than f/t. A lot less regurges and better growth overall. Last month when my mice didn't give birth at a staggered rate and gave me 75 pinks all within a day or so, I had to use f/t pinks for those snakes that still require smaller sizes. All 4 regurged their f/t meals. I waited the 10 days when the last female finally gave birth, they ate and no problems. But it's more cost effective for me to buy the larger sized mice in frozen bulk, its easier and cleaner to store frozen mice than in tanks of mice I have to feed in between feed days.

Thanks for the myriad of tips and suggestions though. It's been about 10 "waves" of babies since I've had the mice, and I was worrying about the potential of inbreeding and how to jazz up the colors of my mice. Maybe if I can get some cute pet mice all grown up I can sell those in addition to producing food for my snakes. =)


Btw, the coffee-colored mouse in the picture, he's got me perplexed. I've seen this in rodents and my Siberian dwarf hamsers exhibit the same thing. Creamy brown bodies with almost albino pink eyes. Some sort of hypomelanism?

 

[Sasheena]

He looks dove colored to me... which means he has the non-agouti gene (agouti is wildtype mouse) and the pink eye gene:

aa pp (aa will be a black mouse, or a light gray mouse when combined with the pink eye gene) That is the most likely possibility...

If you thought that cornsnake genetics were confusing, mouse genetics are even more confusing... here's a few from off the top of my head:

A = wild type/agouti
a = black
A = Yellow
A(vy) = Tiger Striped

B = wild type
b = brown dilution

C = wild type/full color
c = albino
c(ch) = chinchilla
c(h) = himalayan
c(e) = extreme dilution.

D = wild type
d = blue dilution


P = wild type
p = pink eye dilute

And then there are marking genes:
S = wild type
s = piebald/cow mouse

W = Variegated
W(b) = Banded
RW = White rump
hs = headspot

And then there are fur type genes:
HR = Wild type
hr = hairless
fr = frizzy hair
fz = fuzzy hair
lgh = long hair
ca = caracul (curly hair)
Re = Rex (curly hair)
sa = satin hair

And then you get in to some more esoteric genes:

Cream = flourescent yellow spotting showing up even on albino mice!
dumbo = funky ears, sometiems only one ear, sometimes two ears
Porcine Tail = Pig like curls to the tail
Small EArs
Big Ears

That's all i could think of off the top of my head.

And you know I find mouse genetics EASIER (and I think that's because I've had ten zillion generations of mice since I started breeding them!)

 

[Taceas]

Oh my lord..you have way too much time on your hands, dear. =P

I don't think I've seen any one of those mice you just dictated. Most of my mice have been white albino lab-types. These are my first colored mice. =)

I don't think corn snake genetics are too confusing. Its just trying to remember what is dominant over what, and in corns it seems more genes tend to be co-dominant more often than not. Where as in humans, its either expressed or hidden.

Do you breed these exotic mice for snake food, or do you sell them as pet mice as well? I got these two guys for $1 each, which is cheaper considering PetSmart charges nearly $4 for a mouse of the same or lesser quality.

If you have pics of your mice, I'd love to see them. =)

 

[Sasheena]

Mousedom Mousery

There's a link to my old site. I haven't updated it in a while. If you go to the left hand menu, and click on Mouse Genetics, you can follow any of those links to pages of info about mouse genes, and you can click the photos for larger images.... I could add another dozen or so pictures to the bunch if I really wanted to, but don't have the time. Perhaps this coming summer.

IF you go to the bottom of the link I gave then you can see other fun and helpful mousey pages...

Building a Mouse Cage
Sexing Mice
Mousetrap
Mouse Birth Photos
Mouse Web Graphics
The C-Locus
Breeding a BEW mouse

And even Mousey Cartoons

See, I bought 2.1 snakes with the intention of breeding them someday, then I bought more young snakes. Then I bought mice to feed the snakes... but the snakes were more than a year away from being able to breed, so I focused for a while on breeding mice and learning their genetics. (hubby has a degree in genetics). So I learned a lot about the genes of the mice, all the while feeding them to my snakes.

And yes, I sell my mice to petstores.... basically they pay me their standard feeder rate 45 cents cash, 50 cents store credit, and then they take the prettiest fancies and put them in their fancy bin, and they take the most robust young mice and put them in their breeder bins, and the rest are sold as feeders. AT this point in time I think that the breeders in three or four stores are from my stock! I love the fact that I have colorful mice, because they are interesting. My best breeders (robust, good parents, docile/non-bitey, huge litters) are a little more boring. They come in Albino, Black eyed white, and light gray, also they come in long haired and in satin as well as normal hair. I'll be crossing them with some of my darker lines of good breeders.

~Sasheena

 

[CornCrazy]

OK...I know this isn't a REAL mouse, but I had to share the project my daughter is working on. She made me a mouse whistle yesterday. It is made from clay. She still has to paint it and seal it, but I love it already. It has a beautiful sound!

Here is a picture of the side:

And the front:

And the rear:

The funny part is having to blow in it's rear end.