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Do hairless mice breed just as fast as any other mice??np
reptilewild
Oct 01, 2003 01:56 PM
Replies (1)
Sasheena
Oct 01, 2003 07:12 PM
The biggest problem with hairless mice is that the females don't lactate. I find that my hairless male is just as willing... AND ABLE... to get his girls pregnant. The one female hairless I had that actually had a litter, ate 10 of the fourteen babies before I was able to rescue the last four.
Of course I may be biased by the quality of hairless mice I got from the lab. They were everything I was told they would be... sickly being one of the primary things. The female had one litter then died shortly thereafter. The male fathered five or six litters before getting an infected eye and dying. The first set of hairless I got from his heterozygous offspring, ended up getting similar eye infections and dying off. I produced about 8 hairless and of those only one ever lived past a couple of months of age. Of course he is the product of outbreeding with my most robust and healthiest mice, so I surmise I've bred "out" the main gene that makes them so susceptible to the eye infections. He's now produced a HUGE crop of heterozygous offspring (again outbred to my most successful, huge, robust, wonderful mice) I'm crossing him back to his most robust daughters, hoping that I get a very healthy crop of hairless babies. We'll see. I imagine I'll have babies in a couple of weeks. 
The nice thing is that het for hairless females DO produce just as well as any other mice.
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~Sasheena
