breeding mice procedure poll

[Mike Cavanaugh]

If you are bredding a male mouse with multiple females at once, do you remove him by the 18th day or do you leave him in there all of the time?

If you do remove him, do you have trouble re-introducing him once the moms are ready for another round?

[Beardedragon]

I keep my male in there with the females always, and when i see one that is close to haveing its litter, i remove it, not the male.

[MarkS]

I've found it difficult to introduce or re-introduce any adult into an established group. Not always, but sometimes the others in the group will kill any newcomers.

Mark

[Stewart_Reptiles]

You need to find what works for you that requires experimenting!

I have try harem, leaving the male in at all time and it was catastrophic, 100% loss

I house 2 females per tubs and have a male rotate through 3 tubs spending 2 weeks at the time in each tub and never had any problems.

[PythonWallace]

I just started breeding my 1.6 mice last month, but I've had 4 litters in the last 10 days with a 5th girl about to pop. I have 2 large kritter keepers each with 0.3 females, and I have 1 male that gets moved back and forth every week. When a female is pregnant I move her into a medium K.K. until the babies are weaned. I move them into new clean K.K.s at the same time so noone is being thrown into an established colony.

[Corrupter]

I just leave all of them together and when I see a female ready to pop, I put her in a seperate tank. I let her raise the babies, wean them, then give her a little break before re-introducing her to the group again. I am doing the same with my rats. I heard you can leave ASFs together and they usually dont eat babies so I will find out if this is true or not. One of my ASFs just had ~15 from what I can count and she is with another pregnant female right now. The male had to be removed 2 weeks ago though because the females ripped half of his face off. He is recovering nicely

[Windridge Kennels]

I leave my male mouse in with my females at all times. So far, I have not had any problems with this method.

[ctrlfreq]

Neither... we usually have two tubs of adolescent mice, sorted by sex, then any number of general population tubs, where large numbers of males and females are mixed, and then, every other week or so, we pull the visibly pregnant females from those tubs, and put them together into maternity tubs, where 15-20 females will all drop their litters within a week or so of each-other, and cross nurse until they're weaned and separated into the M/F adolescent tubs.

We tend to feed off the general population tubs, males first, since they're usually the most crowded. We run through around 50 mice a week with this system.

[cassandra]

I just leave all of them together and when I see a female ready to pop, I put her in a seperate tank. I let her raise the babies, wean them, then give her a little break before re-introducing her to the group again.the females ripped half of his face off. He is recovering nicely

This is what I do...the "group" gets moved around since I have a hodge podge of cages (generally one grow out boy cage, one grow out girl cage, one littler dropping cage and the KK where the boy is), but generally my boy stays in a KK with one of more girls, depending on who's preggers and raising a litter...

[Beardedragon]

I keep my male in there with the females always, and when i see one that is close to haveing its litter, i remove it, not the male.

wow, I am surprised to see what I used to do only three months ago! Now I just keep my tubs of 1.5-9 together and the male does not bother the babys, im a little over run right now too! Now that ive done a few things I can say through experiance do what works for you. If you like the idea of keeping them all together, and your first little gets eaten, try it again. The best thing to do is not give up!