[moustress]

Here are some updated pix of Babs' and Chuck's babies at about 3 weeks. You can't see them, but Babs has her second litter hidden in a nest under the surface of the bedding. It took me a minute to locate them as they were pretty quiet until I disturbed the older baby who was warming the nest, at which point they let out a chorus of tiny eekings.

 

[moustress]

Thanks, nanette. I've bred so many of them that they now take up over half of my mousery population. I guess I find them endlessly fascinating because no two of them as ever the same.

 

[moustress]

I had thought, when I first got tricolours from a breeder in the NYC area, that they were new and rare. By now, I've found that they have been around for decades in some form or another, and are available in distant parts of the world. It is not unlikely to think that they'd be available from a breeder in the southern California area. A guy on the Little Squeaks forum turns out to have them and didn't know it until I told him that the splashed type of marking is based on the tricolour factor. He's in Michigan, I think.

I'd be happy to share the wealth with anyone who was willing to come and get them in person. I offered some young tris to a guy that wanted a couple of does, but he wasn't interested. He got a couple of my satin fawn does instead. Since he waaasn't going to breed meeces, it doesn't make any difference, I guess. I love to see more folks breeding tris as it would help us all figure out exactly what's going on with the tri factor.

Truth be told, I'm beginning to suspect that there will never be any way to predict the outcome of pairings with any high degree of accuracy because of what seems to me to be a built in randomizing element, or multiple factors that behave differently depending on several other factors that may be genetic or the product of environment or diet.

 

[moustress]

Here are the new pix of the newest tri litters

First are the pix of Babs' and Chuck's second litter. they, as you see, are all black and white, with only one showing tri markings. A bit of a disappointment, but , so it goes...





Another litter of satin fawn meeces:



And lastly, Adamantine's and Adamant's second litter, in which I am very pleased:

 

[moustress]

Not only nice markings, but nice big babies; I have huge hands for a woman BTW. I have to wear men's size large gloves.

 

[moustress]

Thanks, guys!

Here are a couple of new pix of Adamantine's little ones:

 

[moustress]

I'll be passing over Pennsylvania in about a week; why don't you you grab your jet pack and meet me at about 40,000 ft. over Pittsburgh? Oops, different parallel world- sorry!

 

[moustress]

Some day, hopefully in the next couple of years, I'm going to make a pilgrimage to RodentFest. I can then spread the wealth from my mousery and pick up some new quality blood for my mousery. I'm getting tired of pet store finds that just aren't healthy enough to ever make it into any of my breeding plans. I've come to think of those occasional purchases as rescues from the crowded conditions in those places. RodentFest is where my tris came from thanks to a NYC breder who hand delivered to a breeder from Wisconsin from whom I picked them up.

 

[moustress]

Thanks! I love the unexpected diversity that comes with breeding tris. Each different set of combinations gives different results. It looks like some types of tri have a sort of chemical roulette wheel that randomizes what happens; the results aren't always happy ones, unfortunately.

The problems classifying tris comes in part, I think, from the fact that many (like thousands) different manipulations were done over decades of lab work, so there are a lot of 'tri-like' mammalian phenomena that are out there. Cattanach's Translocation is just the best known and one of the earlier attempts experimenting in this way.

In my original forum we talked about trying to get the glow-in-the-dark mousies, but they were too expensive. then there are the problems with distributing the generations fairly...

 

[moustress]

A while back I cruised through a number of sites with info on transgenic strains and found a few hundred just in one site that use the beige,brown, black combo type tri. White Cattancach did his experiment mostly just to see what would happen, the majority of them are designed for a very specific purpose. The details on each and every one of those hundreds run, per case, to many, many pages. It's hard for me to see the value in trying to set standards...

I digress. I'm glad you enjoy the pix.