Curious Manor

Louie's Wing

Generally, female mice, or does, are mature and ready to breed at and after three months of age. Although they are technically and theoretically able to become pregnant at the age of about five weeks, responsible breeders will identify by sex and seperate the males from the females and in order to prevent unwanted and unplanned litters. A doe can produce an average of ten babies in a litter, so it is all too easy to produce a large number of mice in a short period of time.

There are several different approaches to breeding that are found among various breeders. First there are those who breed just for the fun of raising baby mousies. That's where many breeders start, and that's how I started. It's exciting to have little pink blobs mature into tiny furry mousies in just a few weeks time. After that, it's croggling to see how quickly the little darlings grow; you can see the changes on a day to day basis. After a litter or two, some folks get curious to know how and why different colors, markings, and coat types occur.

With nothing being obvious to the uninformed, one is amazed at the variety of markings,colors and coat types seen in mice.

Once you do a little reading in animal genetics, you learn that all animals carry the same range of possibilities in their genes, up to a point. A good example is the appearance of black and albino individuals. These mutations arise in every every animal species, including fruit flies and mice. In mammals, the genetics of coat color and type are pretty consistent thoughout. Thus, there are Siamese mice for Siamese cats, Himalayan mice for Himalayan cats, and on and on. Striped, spotted, brindled, longhair, short haired, etc., the variations go on and on. For most of these types of colors and markings, we can thank some breeder in past decades for taking note of a spontaneous mutation and doing to work necessary to stabilizing the new color or marking by inbreeding until the gene is fixed and consistently passed on to subsequent generations.

Of course, there are new mutations that arise, and new varieties that appear in the mouse fancy. Recently, we have seen the emergence of true tricolor mice in England. Before that, several decades ago, we saw the development of a new coat type in mice that is called 'satin' because of the fine, shimmery feel and appearance of the coat. I'm sure that there are other new types of mice being bred at this time that we will learn about in the next ten or twenty years.

My other project involves one of the more recent types of mouse coats that was developed several decades ago. It is the satin coat, so called because of it's sleek, shiny, lustrous coat, which shimmers like satin. One of the unfortunate realities in the world of forced breeding is that the breeder has to in breed many generations before the characteristic one is breeding for becomes a trait that is reliably and predictably passed on in any given pairing. Thus, I am trying to contribute to the mouse fancy by breeding healthier satin mice. The inbreeding has left satin mice with several different harmful recessives, at the very least. there may be more that have not as yet been identified and named.

Satin mice tend to be smaller, less fertile, and shorter lived than mice with a standard coat. They often suffer from congenital abnormalities that cause death at the age of five weeks or so. It's also been documented that many satin mice suffer from a weak immune system that makes them more susceptible to any of a number of illnesses.

The satin coat, by the way, has it's lustrous appearance because the individual hairs are hollow. I don't find it at all surprising that such a radical change in the structure of the hair follicle would be linked to other anatomical and chemical differences in the satin mouse. These mice, when healthy, are very pretty, especially in certain colors. The translucency of the individual hairs gives any color an added depth that is truly stunning in the red and yellow spectrum, and is quite lovely in other colors as well.

I'm happy to report that I have had some success in establishing a pretty healthy stable of satin mice using a couple of different methods. The first method involves simply choosing to breed only the biggest, most healthy satin mice. The second involves breeding big, healthy satin mice to my best standard mice. The litters produced by this second method produces mice with standard coats, but who carry the recessive gene for the satin coat. I then breed these mice together, getting about 3/4 standard and 1/4 satin offspring in the resulting litters.

Made November27,2005