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Originally Posted by suzuki4life
do you happen to have alink to this info? Just curious to the reasoning of seperating them
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He describes it somewhere on his site, but it's somewhat difficult to find. He actually did a much better job explaining it on one of his radio shows.
The link to the broadcast is here
http://tinyurl.com/yuc4vl
There are two main benefits that affect productivity. First the males breed stronger when regularly introduced to new females. Second, once the rotation system is in place, you always know which females are failing to produce. The females in the last tub in the rack have made it all the way through without becoming pregnant. Once they get there you have the option of replacing them in the colony with young females or putting them back through the cycle again if you don't have enough fresh females ready. Listen to the radio show and it'll be much clearer than I can make it here.
With the harem system, if you have a large number of tubs going at least, it's often difficult if not impossible to remember which litters belonged to which female and which ones haven't produced in a while.
I'm sure it's also beneficial to the nursing females to be able to care for their litter without having a bunch of other rats roaming around, but the primary benefit is to increase overall production.
I have always removed pregnant females from the breeding colony, but it was mainly just to make room for females ready to be bred to be placed with the male. I used to rotate males though during cleaning and the females stayed in the same tub. That method didn't provide the full benefits though I realized after Ralph fully explained the reasoning behind his method, so now I rotate females instead and the males remain in place.
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