xXRecreationXx
Not so new Member
When can I move the babies from the Mother/ Mothers ? There eating by themselves.
Hi, Advise on breeding feeder Rats thanks.
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GeckoJosh
Almost Legendary
At 2 weeks old they open their eyes, 3 weeks old they start eating solids, 4-5 weeks they wean them selves. Technically you can safely force wean them after 3 weeks but you are much better off waiting until they are 4-5 weeks.
Make sure you separate the sexes before 5 weeks old otherwise you run the risk of having young does fall pregnant.
xXRecreationXx
Not so new Member
Thank you very much. I have separated them.
Starter
Not so new Member
I can confirm that. My grandmother of now 92 years used to pull a trailer to work twice a week to pick up all the leftovers from the company's canteen to feed her one piglet every year (which was then slaughtered before the next piglet moved in). I guess you could do something similar in your neighbourhood, if you want to breed on a larger scale.
Rats will really eat almost anything! They are the easiest-to-breed and most reproductive animals I have ever encountered. My own rat doe (I only have one breeding pair) has recently delivered 14 babies in one go, and 9 more only three weeks later - that is what I call FERTILITY! Now she is having a sex break for at least two months, while we will be raising her sweet babies to be the right size of snake food when our snakes wake up from brumation in September. Kind of weird. Kind of YUCK, but it must be done.
andynic07
Very Well-Known Member
I have never heard of a rat having more babies 3 weeks after her first litter and to my knowledge it is impossible. Female rats come on heat every 4-5 days unless pregnant or nursing which your rat would until a minimum of 3 weeks unless you euthanise them earlier, they are then pregnant for roughly 21 days before the next litter can be born. I have a small breeding set up and usually put the male in with the female for 10 days to ensure 2 cycles then seperate the pair and the female will have her litter anywhere between 11 and 23 days after this point depending on when the female conceived. Also another bit of information for the OP is that rats do not like hot weather and will not breed over 30 degrees and if it gets too hot you may have rats die. When I first set up my breeding racks I had them under my verandah but for an hour in the afternoon some of the boxes had direct sunlight and during summer I lost about seven fuzzy rats due to heat. These were spread over three litters and to fix this I put up some shade cloth and they have been fine since.
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wokka
Guest
Most mammals including rats can fall pregnant if mated on their parturition cycle which in rats is within 30 hours of giving birth so if you leave the males and females together a litter every 3 weeks is the norm. I imagine that would burn the mother out fairly quick but if you only want to maximise numbers that may be the way to do it!
Dont believe everything you read on aps as often the self appointed experts post with very little knowledge and experience. There is plenty of peer reviewed reserch available on the net which could be better to base decisions upon.
Dont believe everything you read on aps as often the self appointed experts post with very little knowledge and experience. There is plenty of peer reviewed reserch available on the net which could be better to base decisions upon.
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andynic07
Very Well-Known Member
Wow that is an amazing fact that I did not know of. The only information that I have read about the matter was from a rat breeding website that stated a mother will not come in heat while nursing and I assumed that if she does not come in heat then she would not fall pregnant and as I always separate the males from females after the initial 10 days I have never had actual experience with this.
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solar 17
Guest
There are some points not mentioned here (temps) 23-24c is optimal for breeding and there are several excellent sites overseas that state this and yes they will breed at higher temps but 23-24 is the target temp: another point is the female will except a male within minutes of giving birth and then cycle every 96-98 hrs.....for anyone keen enough there is a great reference book out there called The Biology and Medicine of Rabbits and Rodents by J.E. Harkness & J.E. Wagner. solar 17
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wokka
Guest
I have noticed that different strains of rodents accimatise to different optimen conditions. they often seem to breed better during the change of seasons ( Spring or Autumn) even in temperture controlled rooms.
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wokka
Guest
I wonder how much of the percieved improvement related to feed is a placeebo effect? ie The more you pay for, and manipulate the feed, the better it is.
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The percentage of protein in the feed isn't important, it's the ratio of protein:fat:carbohydrate which matters, and the bioavailability of it. A woollen jumper is 100% protein, a cotton shirt is 100% carbohydrate, but they're nutritionally useless. Assuming the protein, fat and carbohydrate are good quality, available nutrients, if the protein content was halved but the other nutrients were also halved, the rats would perform the same but just eat twice as much (and leave twice as much rat $#!t for you to clean up). Similarly, if the protein content was doubled and the other nutrients were too, the rats would only eat half as much.
This is an internet forum so someone will probably want to jump in, go all fanatical nit picky and point out that what I've said is only 99% accurate and that there is a trivial change in digestive efficiency etc. so the performance won't exactly double or halve. If so, congratulations, I won't argue
You get the gist of it (yeah, you can see years of reptile forum exposure have left me jaded :lol: ).
Interesting observations about the seasonal differences, Warwick. Rats' reproduction varies according to photoperiod as well as temperature. As long as the environment is not stressful, photoperiod is the most important influence. I haven't had any fluctuations in output other than when I've kept rats in situations where they get too hot over summer. Studies which looked at reproductive output in relation to photoperiods found that different strains performed differently - some were unaffected and some stopped breeding completely with no fluctuations in light levels. Most were in between.
I hadn't heard that different strains had different temperature preferences but it doesn't surprise me at all. There's a lot more to it than ambient temperature - rats can chill to death over 20 degrees in the wrong environment (damp, lots of airflow, no hide, etc.) or cook to death at under 30 degrees ambient (insulated area or direct sunlight or some other situations), but without drafts or anything too unusual going on I haven't found them to vary all that much between an average of about 8-10 degrees with daily dips below four degrees and mid to high 20s with daytime peaks around 30. You don't need to exceed their tolerance levels by much at all before they fall off the performance cliff, and not much further than that will kill them.
This is an internet forum so someone will probably want to jump in, go all fanatical nit picky and point out that what I've said is only 99% accurate and that there is a trivial change in digestive efficiency etc. so the performance won't exactly double or halve. If so, congratulations, I won't argue
You get the gist of it (yeah, you can see years of reptile forum exposure have left me jaded :lol: ).Interesting observations about the seasonal differences, Warwick. Rats' reproduction varies according to photoperiod as well as temperature. As long as the environment is not stressful, photoperiod is the most important influence. I haven't had any fluctuations in output other than when I've kept rats in situations where they get too hot over summer. Studies which looked at reproductive output in relation to photoperiods found that different strains performed differently - some were unaffected and some stopped breeding completely with no fluctuations in light levels. Most were in between.
I hadn't heard that different strains had different temperature preferences but it doesn't surprise me at all. There's a lot more to it than ambient temperature - rats can chill to death over 20 degrees in the wrong environment (damp, lots of airflow, no hide, etc.) or cook to death at under 30 degrees ambient (insulated area or direct sunlight or some other situations), but without drafts or anything too unusual going on I haven't found them to vary all that much between an average of about 8-10 degrees with daily dips below four degrees and mid to high 20s with daytime peaks around 30. You don't need to exceed their tolerance levels by much at all before they fall off the performance cliff, and not much further than that will kill them.
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wokka
Guest
I am not sure that the bit, about the woollen jumper and the cotton shirt, is is 99% true or relevant, but written with conviction it sounds convincing.lol. Optimen means best and there is a long way between optimen performance and survival in rats, which is why they are so rewarding to work with. There's a lot of room for mistakes or improvement depending where you are at. I wonder if i could trick them into better performance by manipulating day-length.
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GeckoJosh
Almost Legendary
Have you tried Vella? it really is a poor choice, the rats hate it lol
The price difference of a few dollars doesn't really phase me as I only keep around 20 breeding rats and 30 or so breeding mice, all I know is with the mix I use now the hoppers are always empty after 3 days, the Vella on its own would only be half gone, the Vella with kibble was a bit better but they always left some Vella behind and it would go off before they consumed it.
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ingie
Well-Known Member
The kids I work with hate vegetables. Does that make them a poor choice for a healthy dinner? Perhaps McDonalds would be better, because they love it
GeckoJosh
Almost Legendary
The kids I work with hate vegetables. Does that make them a poor choice for a healthy dinner? Perhaps McDonalds would be better, because they love it
Whether its healthy or not is beside the point if they fail to eat it.
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The 99% true bit was mostly in reference to the nutrient ratios being the important thing, and that it doesn't matter whether your feed is, say, 15 or 20 or 25% protein as long as the ratio with other nutrients is good. I they all had the same price tag I would take a 30% protein feed any day, because it's twice the value of the 15% protein feed.
It's 100% true that a woolen jumper is 100% protein (excluding any traces of dye, etc.). The relevant point of that is that some proteins are more digestible than other, so two different feeds may have identical nutritional values on the label, but one may be far superior to the other. Obviously you won't get one brand having perfect protein and another having all their protein completely undigestible, I just used an extreme example to illustrate the point. In terms of what you're likely to find it might be a 90% vs. 70% difference rather than a 0% vs. 100% difference, if that makes sense.
I'm sure you could improve their reproductive output by manipulating the photoperiod, but whether or not it's worth bothering with is another story. Measuring the benefit would be much more bother again as you'd need to set up a control shed near the test shed to account for confounding variables. But you could play around with it and probably get a pretty good idea.
It's 100% true that a woolen jumper is 100% protein (excluding any traces of dye, etc.). The relevant point of that is that some proteins are more digestible than other, so two different feeds may have identical nutritional values on the label, but one may be far superior to the other. Obviously you won't get one brand having perfect protein and another having all their protein completely undigestible, I just used an extreme example to illustrate the point. In terms of what you're likely to find it might be a 90% vs. 70% difference rather than a 0% vs. 100% difference, if that makes sense.
I'm sure you could improve their reproductive output by manipulating the photoperiod, but whether or not it's worth bothering with is another story. Measuring the benefit would be much more bother again as you'd need to set up a control shed near the test shed to account for confounding variables. But you could play around with it and probably get a pretty good idea.
I do not know for rats, but manipulating the photoperiod for chickens can dramatically change there growth. Having a single hour of light every three hours increases growth rates substantially of chickens from day one through to culling. The chosen light colour can influence the end result also. I would imagine that some of this would translate into the growth rate of many different animals. In the end, economic viability would determine the end results.
Regards
Wing_Nut
Regards
Wing_Nut
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wokka
Guest
We have done commercial trials with most feeds although our system is not suited to 10 mm pellets which rules out a lot of brands. What we have found is that price per tonne is not necessarily reflected in production produced.
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