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Breeding Mice Interesting Development

Glenn Bartley

Glenn Bartley

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I have been breeding a few small colonies of Fancy Mice. Just into the thrird generation of somewhat selective breeding to see what would be produced; and an interesting development has come up. A recent group of baby mice were born that later developed very light, fluffy and shaggy fur. They are in the 'crawler stage' and now many of them are begining to lose their hair. They start to lose it in the hind quarters on each side of the rump. In the one that is most advanced, a bit is left around the base of the tail, and some on the lower rear legs and most remains on the front half of the body - but the remainder of the rear half of the body is pretty much hairless. I first thought they may have mites - but there are no other possible signs of mites such as sores from scratching, no visible mites, no excess scratching by the mice, and none of the adults or older juveniles in the colony show these effects. There are also no known environmental causes, and this phenomena is only in one of three colonies.

This has me wondering if I have bred mice that have some type of anomolous genetic change that has caused them to lose their hair. It also makes me wonder if 'nude' mice produce hair as crawlers and then later lose it? Have I put together adult mice that are producing 'nude' offspring?

Any conversation on this subject is welcome. Thanks...
 
I breed nude mice, and the babies do have hair and then after about 2 weeks or a little later they begin losing their hair, and become hairless mice. Don't know if you should be producing hairless mice if your mice were just normal but who knows. I got mind from breeding a het male to a few females then the females back to him, and there I had my hairless mice. Same with my rat breedings to get my hairless rats. hope you can figure out what is causing this, although hairless mice are quite interesting. I found that babies that were either hets for hairless or just going to end up being hairless are quite fluffy as babies, at least my het hairless rats are, some of the fuzziest babies I have ever raised, although they have really smooth fur now. Well anyways hope some of this helped.

Amelia

Erik Spisak Tropicals
 
It sounds almost like "rex" or something like rex... I know that the curly haired gene has been linked to something similar to that... if you have time, try scanning some mouse forums, you will have to weed through the usual eccentrics, but a lot of them know their stuff. I breed "fancy" mice and use my culls as feeders, but I am just working with long haired and "rare" colors and haven't gotten into curly or rex mice yet.
 
Not a rex from pics I have seen. Maybe turning into a Nude Mouse.

As for breeding regular mice - the thing is you never know what is the genetic background of the mice you pick up at a pet store. Even regular albino mice may have genes from many other types of mice, so when they are bred to something other than an albino those traits may come out. I bred a male that resembles a Fox Mouse (brown above off white or beige below) to an albino female and to a close to Cinnamon female. The outcomes were a wide array of colors from a sort of brindle to silver to Argente, to splashed, to a somewhat splashed beige or champagne male (he has some darker color splashed throughout his coat). I bred a few chosen female babies of those liters back to the original male and got some nice beige mice and apparent Argente mice and more sort of Brindle among others. I bred that second generation splashed beige or splashed champagne male to his silver sister (both pink eyes) and got 4 more silver (pink eyes), a couple of black, about 4 beige or champagne (hard to tell very young still) 3 black, and 5 others. I am also bred this male back to his likely mother, the original albino female (as well as to the original Cinnamon) and got those babies that are losing their hair. I have to do that again to make sure which had those freaky babies, because they were together when those babies were born and both had liters within hours of each other.

I see this could become very interesting, fun, and perplexing; as well as requiring a lot of mouse enclosures and good notes. Right now I am doing it more for the heck of it than anything. Too bad Mendel worked with peas as ice are so much more interactive!

All the best and thanks,
Glenn B
 
I know what you mean about the endless possibilities with mice! :) I have recently gotten back into them and they are starting to take over my "critter room"!
 
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