starting a colony

[corn_mania]

Can you start a colony with 1.1? or do you need more females? I was thinking of freezing the first set of babies and raising the next to make another colony.

 

[chausies]

you can start a colony any way you like, it will just take longer that way and your gene pool will be very small until you add new bloodlines. Mice generally tolerate inbreeding very well, but if the pair that you bought happens to carry harmful recessive genes then those will show up when you start to inbreed and you may have to discard your entire breeding colony to replace them with viable stock. I keep a wide variety of bloodlines in my breeding colony and every now and then I identify a bloodline that produces weak and/or deformed animals and I removed that line from my colony. Removing an entire line is not devastating to a large breeding colony, but it can be if you have only one or a few lines to work with (you may have to start from scratch in order to get a line that breeds well for you, produces enough babies, and produces health stock.) However, if you avoid a lot of inbreeding then you can keep your lines healthy for longer with the least amount of effort (labs do maintain breeding colonies of mice that are strictly inbred for 20 or more generations, but it requires a lot more observation and work to keep the lines going, to keep them healthy, and to weed out undesirable genes.)

good luck! charlene

 

[simple_minded]

I have a 1.1 pair of fancy mice and they started having babies just after a month. I have my first litter now which is almost 2 weeks old, and the female is already pregnant with her second litter. I think inbreeding for 1 generation should be fine. But like Chausies said, avoid too much inbreeding or you could have some nasty recessive genes showing up.

 

[Flagg]

I wouldn't worry about inbreeding for feeder mice. I think it's pretty rare that some devastating genetic defect shows up.

 

[corn_mania]

Ok that sounds good now gotta somehow let parents get me to get mice. Lol