Mausoleum

Matings

In brief

In Mausoleum there is no special procedure to set up a nating, Combining a male with one or more females in a cage automatically defines this cage as a mating cage as soon as the mice have reached the predefined sexual maturity. For that reason matings aren't very special objects in Mausoleum. They are determined on the fly and represent a subset of cages with potentially sexual active mice.

In exactly the same manner you do not need to care about ending a mating. If the potential mating partners are separated Masuoelum automatically regards thsi mating as finished and it will no longer be displayed in the mating table.

The ownership of matings is completely inherited from the mice taking part. This means that every user who owns mice in this mating is regarded as owner of the mating.

The mating table

After clicking "Matings" in the object selection area of the Mausoleum inspector you will get the cage window with the "Matings"-tab selected showing the table of all active mating cages. Using the command "Arrange columns" from the context menu (right mouse click in the table) you can specify which attributes of the matings should be shown in this table. These attributes are available for a mating table:

In the mating table you can specify whether you want to see all objects of the group or only the objects you own. To switch between these display modes you use the little "A" button in top right corner of the table:

If this button is active (pressed) you will see all objects of the group. Your own objects are shown in black whereas objects owned by other users are shown with a blue font color.

The Mating Inspector

As mentioned above there are no special attributes of matings to be set in Mausoleum. Therefore only a "Mice"-tab is shown in the Mating Inspector. In this tab you see a table with the mice which are contained in the selected matings.

Because this table is within the inspector it cannot be used to modify the attributes of the displayed mice. To generated a mouse table which can be used to alter the attributes of the mice you click the button "Convert this view to Mouse display" and a window with a snapshot of the cage contents will open:

Setting up a mating

In Mausoleum there is no special procedure to set up a nating, Combining a male with one or more females in a cage automatically defines this cage as a mating cage as soon as the mice have reached the predefined sexual maturity. Sexual maturity is default to six weeks or 42 days. It can be adjusted between 21 and 56 days and overrides the preceding category.The sexual maturity can be set for strains, lines and individual mice. The sexual maturity for a mouse is determined using this scheme:

1. check the mouse. If a maturity limit ist specified for the mouse use it.
2. check the line of the mouse If a maturity limit ist specified for the line use it.
3. check the strains of the mouse If a maturity limit ist specified for one of the strains use it.
4. use the default value of six weeks

It is important to note that it is absolutely crucial that the correct date for the transfer of mice into a cage is given by the user because Mausoleum wil determine from these dates the father for a litter. Also other parameters such as the breeding perfomance relie completely on accurate dates for the mouse transfers.

Adding females to a cage with more than one male is prohibited by the Mouse pope and reported to the GURU as improper mouse handling. An alert will pop up if this happens.

Breeding performance can be evaluated by selecting "Mating report" in the context menu of mouse tables. If the same mice have been moved around you can also track with the "Visit report" command in the context menu of mouse tables.