Hello my long lost blog friends, Connie returns after a long hiatus, and I finally have something in store for you rat people!

Remember these guys?

 M. Richter ©

Of course you do! Who wouldn't remember the pure white African soft furred rats found (so far) only in Europe? Well, I have been able to get in touch with one of these ASF breeders in Germany with the pure white ASF's, Stefan, and I am hoping to get some of his input (and beautiful photography ) on the breeding for the high white ASF rats.

Do we in America have the right gene's to attempt breeding? How white can the American lines get? We will find out soon enough. I have my own small bits of high white groups I am attempting to work with, we will see how far I can get, and what I may be lacking in my own colonies preventing me from getting to that summit of a pure snow white ASF rat.

Check back in a few weeks, see where I have gotten with the article, and hopefully enjoy some good pictures.

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This boy is turning into a breeding machine after totally sitting out this past season.  Dropped him in the tub when I was home for lunch at noon, four hours later and he's already locked up.

Just as a side note, it's a serious pain trying to take pictures of what's going on in a 41qt tub six feet in the air!

Being that our plans for the albino girl are more than likely shot for this year, I decided to toss our enchi in with her.  I'm hoping to get some nice oranges like the albino clowns have, but afraid that it will just end up looking like nothing more than a reduced pattern albino.

This girl is a MONSTER.  She's had tremendous growth for us in the year that we've had her.  We got her in October of last year at the Tinley Park NARBC show.  She weighed 534 grams at the time.  At one appropriately sized meal per week for not quite a year, she's grown from that little girl into this 1850 gram monster you see below.  Looking forward to breeding her this coming season and really curious if her offspring will have the same bottomless pit appetite and amazing growth rate that she's had for us.

Looks like our little (or not so little anymore, he's hit the 1000 gram mark) enchi boy finally figured out what he was supposed to do when I drop him in a girl's cage.  This is actually the first lock I've seen from either of these animals.  Not the strongest lock I've seen, but at least he's getting the hang of it.  Come on stinger bees!

2009 Season

I may have made a slight mistake yesterday.  We didn't pair up our het clowns this year because the girl was only around 1400 grams and we wanted to give her a year to get some more weight on her.  Unfortunately, when winter came around she had other plans.  She started developing follicles and hasn't eaten since.  Yesterday while I was cleaning tubs I figured I'd toss the male in with her for a little bit to see if it would stimulate her to start eating again.  Went into the snake room this morning to do my rounds and I came across this.

Yep, I completely forgot that I put the male in with her last night.  The plan was to pull him back out when I was finished cleaning in there.  Whoops!  Guess they're starting early this year.