Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Earlier I posted a thread about the differences in feeding behavior between kings fathered by a Bay Area snake and kings fathered by a Redding snake with the same mother.

Another thought just occurred to me.

Here in Redding, right now during hatching season, it is extremely hot. We're talking at least 108F for the past few days - but with a few breaks, it'll be 100F during the day for some time.

Rodents really reduce and may even stop breeding during this kind of heat. I know rodents breed here in the spring because I find them, I don't know that I've found any here during the fall but I'm guessing they may breed in the fall, unless they are conserving their food supply for the winters (which get cold, though rarely snow).

It could be that up here, the baby lizards and smaller snake species are simply they prey that are available to the neonates - so the snakes that will take rodents out of the egg are at no natural selection advantage to those that refuse rodents out of the egg. In fact, if the neonates that are hatching now pursued rodent scent as a food source, it may be unlikely that they would find rodents of a size they could consume - because rodents really don't do much breeding in extreme heat.

Now we do have gopher snakes, which as a species are rodent specialist. I've only found one neonate, and it was 14 inches ... in March of this year. Gopher snakes sometimes hatch out bigger than 14 inches. Given his enormous growth rate in captivity where I feed him about once a week (he's downing adult mice now) - I suspect that as a neonate before his first winter, he probably didn't find much if any prey to consume.
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Arrrggg!
It's like Shalom, but for pirates.
- iCarly

The temperatures here in the Sierra Foothills have also been in the triple digits the last few days.
I have a new colony of two doe mice and one buck, to produce live pinkies for my small snake collection. I got them a few days before the heat wave, and I think they did mate, but am not sure. Every day I give them a freeze pack wrapped in a towel so they can cool off, and they spend all day on it in great comfort.
Still though, since you have pointed out that wild mice don't breed during the intense summer heat, do you think the same applies to domestic mice?
(No, I don't have access to air conditioning; the solar panels can only power so much.)

My experience trying to breed domestic mice in the heat failed - the females that did breed all died within 24 hours of delivery.

My rat project - the females this year so far have refused the males, I left them in with the males for a week - no witnessed copulation, no babies 3 weeks later, females don't look gravid.

Might have been the males were a tad young, but they gave chase to the skirts.

Breeding wild rodents in captivity is hard anyway. It apparently takes 3 or 4 generations of selective breeding before productivity is anywhere near decent quantity.

Even with the norwegian rats, take a perfectly domested female and knock her up with a wild male - raising the young in captivity, it will be several generations before you get good production out of the line.
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Arrrggg!
It's like Shalom, but for pirates.
- iCarly

When I was a kid I had rats and mice and my mother got quite upset at the ensuing population explosion! I wasn't doing this in the heat of summer, though, but in the spring.
The heatwave has broken and the temps are now down in the low 90's Fahrenheit. I kept the mice from overheating with the ice packs. The mice look okay, doing their little mouse things, playing on their hamster wheels, sampling the assortment of grains and seeds (they love rolled oats). If they don't get started with family life until fall, no big deal. That's only a few weeks away now.
My mice are in a big cage, 24 by 24 x 16 inches.
A few years ago I had mice for a little rattlesnake I kept for a few months. This was in the fall. I released the snake in the spring(in a remote area!) and gave the mice to a friend. The mice made pinkies readily.