Hi Shawn,
One of the basic ways to breed rats & mice without getting too anal about it is in a rack system utilizing any size of tub you want. They eat through the wire above, which is important because yu don't want your rodents eating contaminated food. See Ralph Davis Reptiles site, the October diary, for instructions. He also sells them. Beyond that, most people breed their rodents "Harem" style; that is, one male & several females all in one cage. This is about the only way to breed mice, except in pairs, but why feed all those extra males. Rats are a different story. Female rats are such incredible mothers that they will actually fight to take care of the babies, and will tear them in half doing so. For that reason, a lot of people, myself included, like to seperate out all pregnant females & let them raise their babies up by themselves. That way, any females that have less than 8 babies or so can be culled out & replaced with a different, hopefully better producing female. The babies turn out better & you'll end up with more babies surviving out of any given litter. But the simpliest method would be to set up your rats in the same "harem" style system as you do your mice. The only real drawback is production. Production won't be as high as it is when you pull the pregnant females. You can run twice as many females too because half of your females are out raising up litters at any given time. It takes more spece, but you have twice as many females. While it is true that a female rat can & will get pregnant immediantly after giving birth, several things happen that really make it not the best of ideas. First, the litter is born before the other litter is weined off. You can put bunches of other rats babies with a lactating (milk producing = nursing) female & she will raise all of them, in fact setting up several nests, but they don't get the care & attention as they otherwise would. Second, a lot of things can happen to baby rats in a harem type setup. Not all make it, and the ones who do may not be as good as if they were raised by themselves or it takes longer to get to a specific size to be weined. plus, the bigger babies will dominate the smaller rats & attention from Mom. Your kinda splitting hairs I guess, as both systems will be successful. the main thing to remember is rodents are not like reptiles; you have to take care of them religiously,and you always have to be improving your colony. If you don't, you will all of a sudden have a period where production has dipped for a variety of reasons. You have to get on a system & never vary. The more routine you can make it the better. It can be very simple or very complex, depending on what you want it to be, but do things, like cleaning & feeding, on a system. You'll find automatic watering systems are really great.
Hope this helps, if you e-mail me I can send you some pics of some set ups.
Paul Edwards
