I was at a petshop the other day getting a new aquarium for our fish
(the other one desperately needs cleaning, so we'll put them in a small
one for the time being while we de-gunge the big one).
While we were waiting for the girl to get a chance to get the new
aquarium down from the shelves, up high, we took SAndrine (my daughter)
over to see the small animals in cages. WE looked at mice, Chinchillas,
gerbils, hamsters, a feret...and then came across the rats.
There were 3 mommy rats in the same cage all with young babies. Well,
relatively young.
There was a Mommy in one corner with only one newborn nursing on her.
By newborn, I estimate (having had similar small animals before,
including a nursing gang...) by the navel scar that they were under 3
days old. Pretty young. Hairless, colourless, and blind (eyes
closed). Mommy #2 was in another corner, and she was sprawled out with
older rats that (the girl in the petshop told me) were about 4 weeks
old. They looked like miniatures of the moms: hairy, snoozing, but not
blind anymore, etc. Pretty self-sufficiant at this age. In fact, they
definately looked close to 1/3 their adult size. ;-)
Mommy #3 was in another corner, and she was hunched over a tangled mess
of babies. There were probably at least 10 under her horse-shoed shape,
suckling away. These were newborns too. But then I saw another of the
older ones...suckling away on Mommy #3 too! She was tandem nursing 2
ages of babies! Perhaps 3, though two of them would be close in age.
>From what I gathered from this scene, Mommy #1 had a litter of babies.
I suspect the one baby nursing off Mommy #1 was her own...and I think
some of the others were under Mommy #3. Not sure though. Perhaps she
only had one baby after all...and Mommy #3 had lots...
Mommy #2 was probably the mom of the "teen-aged rats". Including the
older one nursing off Mommy #3.
Mommy #3 had a heck of a lot of rat-lings nursing off of her, and I'm
pretty sure she had some of her own litter and some of Mommy #1's
litter, as well as that older rat she was tandem-nursing, that was
definately more than a few days age-difference with the other 2 litters
(I am assuming there were 2 litters, though perhaps I'm wrong).
Steve speculated that perhaps Mommy #3 made the most milk, or had the
nicest tasting milk...or was the easier-going of all of them, who would
let the nurslings nurse for ages and ages if the other ones had booted
them off the nipples long ago? I don't know.
Anyhow, I was speculating the age (relative) of the older rat nursling.
I had gerbils and hamsters at one point in my life and was told their
"really old age" life expectancy is about 3 years. I don't know if the
same is to be said of rats, but I was assuming it was around that. Just
to make things easy to calculate, I imagined 3 years for a rat was like
90 human years. Divide by 3, and you get 30 rat years per human year of
life. OK, so divide by the number of months in a year...and you get an
idea that this older rat-ling was "still nursing" around about 2.5 years
of age! Funny that, eh?
Maybe my calculations are off...if rats live to a ripe old age of 5
years this would screw things up a bit...but it would still mean that
rat, at the age of 4 weeks, was nursing quite a bit older than most
people think is "ok" for humans to do nowadays!
I pointed this out (the rat nursing 2 different ages) to the lady in the
petshop who was most un-impressed that I even took her time away from
her job about it...she said it's normal and happens all the time. Well,
that is nice to know...at least they don't start separating them from
their mother at like 2 weeks saying "they should be eating solids by
now...". OK, maybe if someone wants to buy one they'll get to go away
with a 4 week old nursling but they didn't make a point of separating
them to wean them BEFORE selling them (i.e. by putting them in a
separate cage from Mom).
Fio.
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