Jersey*Girl
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Thank you Labrat...you are invaluable!
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Extremely dirty cages become very humid inside, the bedding gets wet and the food molds. It is not a pretty sight.
Pups (baby mice) will die of hypothermia if the cage floods. If a cage is without food or water for too long, mice will cannibilize any pups in the cage.
Mice will sometimes fight, especially the males and they can wound each other very badly.
If you do not wean a litter at the correct time, within a week or two all the females will be pregnant. If you are really negligent, you could end up with a LOT of mice in one cage.
Husbandry SOP is 5 adult mice per cage, or one mating pair plus litter per cage. If you do harem mating, you have to take the pregnant females out of the cage before they give birth, because you can't have multiple litters in one cage.
It is sometimes very difficult for the animal techs, because ultimately they are responsible for the mice in the room, but the mice belong to the PI, not the technician, so there can be some tension there.
Good technicians really do have a hard time if students and techs are sloppy in the room. Alternately, it can be maddening to a PI to be assigned a careless animal tech.
I would suspect it was not a regular cage or a food/water issue because he would be responsible for that. It was more likley something to do with specially flagged cages or overcrowding since she would be responsible for that. Animal techs are not expected to do any weaning, that's the responsibility of the lab.
Thank you Labrat...you are invaluable!
Ain't that the truth! There are several people contributing to these threads who have been a real goldmine of information about how labs work.
Thanks to all who responded to my post on the earlier thread! I read the first ones, then was gone for the day, so still want to go back over the subsequent pages there.
Couple of thoughts:
I expect Annie was impatient with much that was going on at Yale that day as she was planning on leaving for her wedding soon and her thoughts were undoubtedly on the future. One thing she probably felt she didn't need was an unexpected, unscheduled trip to the animal facility; she may have thought she had everything wrapped up there to be taken care of during her absence. But she was so dutiful and responsible that she went there at the requested time. Very sad, indeed.
I would also like to add that these mice in question were not field mice or mice that might be found in the cellar/basement of a home. Yale had a lot invested in these mice -- in terms of protocols, treatments, medicines, investigators. I expect that the mice had to be analyzed (perhaps dissected) at certain times to determine if these protocols, medicines, treatments, etc., were having their desired effect. Given that, it could be construed as demeaning to say that Raymond Clark "cleaned mice cages" for a living. Not to defend what he is accused of doing to Annie, in any way. But just to encourage a thought or two about the language used in reference to his job which, after all, he had held for four years.
MOO.
Is it common for a grad student to have the same one or two animal techs assigned to her project, or would pretty much anyone on the animal tech staff handle her particular mice? I'm wondering if RC was her designated animal tech, in which case she'd have more reason to talk to him. And if she had to make arrangements with someone about what to do with her mice when she was out of town, would it be just one tech or their supervisor or another grad student?
That's exactly what I think. Now, could you kindly explain what happens when the mice are overcrowded and the level of ammonia rises?
And we think we're going to figure out the motive...
NEW HAVEN, Conn. A Connecticut police chief says authorities may never know the motive for the killing of a Yale University graduate student whose body was found hidden behind a wall.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090918/ap_on_re_us/us_yale_killing_195
There is NO PLACE on WS where it is acceptable to attack other members. Period.
Forgive me if this question has been asked before and I missed it.
Would Clark keep any kinds of records to show if Le's mice overpopulated, or a similar problem that would hamper Clark doing his job?
My thought is, Le would not have been slack -- she had a flawless reputation in her research.
But since her wedding was only a week away, it seems possible her mice got put on the back burner. Clark was trying to keep his "domain" under control, and Le was "making a mess." Possible?
Yes the cages are flagged and a copy goes to the husbandry supervisor. They document everything.
Techs, students and PI's are ALL flawless in their research, but you would be surprised how often they need to be called about overcrowding.
A mouse pregnancy takes only 18-21 days. That's only 3 weeks. If you do pair mating, the female will mate immediately after giving birth. So in another 3 weeks the first litter is ready for weaning, the mom is having the second litter and all her daughters will be knocked up in a week. The average litter is around 8 pups, generally 50/50 M/F. So now you have 5 males, 5 pregnant females and a new litter in the cage. In just 3 more weeks, you will have 9 adult males, 9 pregnant females, and 40 newborn pups. In a shoebox. Just six weeks after you failed to wean that first litter. And that's just one breeding cage. You can have a colossal mess in short order. A good animal tech will step in before it gets this bad.
Now students are very busy. Busy, busy, busy. Exhausted. They have classes, lab meetings, journal club, experiments to do- it goes on and on. Then the animal room is sometimes on the other side of campus- out of sight, out of mind. It is very easy to have time slip away from you. It is not deliberate neglect at all, just too much to do and not enough time.
Larger labs will sometimes have a lab technician who handles all of the breeding, weaning, genotyping for all the PI's mice, but in smaller labs the students take care of their own mice.
Guess what Labrat, Yale offers this service as part of their Rodent Services department! They handle the weaning, colonization and everything! It's done as a service to assist investigators and researchers! Holy cow! Could I have been on the right track all along?
Sounds like Clark's job wasn't exactly stress-free?
Do they charge for it? I believe we have that too, but it's a "special service" and is on the expensive side.