# Plus two, minus one



## Kallan (Aug 16, 2009)

I got two new mice as part of my secret santa present, the nurse who got them for me got them from a well-known petshop and was told they could be housed together. Two males, one is a larger black fox, the smaller a cross of some sort (and I think maybe one is father and one is son).

They were fighting with each other, and I was awaiting more mouse cages to house them both separately.

Unfortunately, the smaller one, my favourite, died last night. Killed by a falling plant pot, as the cat knocked over their cage  So now I'm left with the black fox, who is handsome, but not as cute! (And the cat has been banished for the meantime).

This one is now named Ecclie:
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And this is the wee one who didn't even live long enough to get a name: 


I would like to breed the male to at least one of the females and have been reading furiously over the last week or so to bring myself up to scratch. I will have 5 mouse cages when my next batch of cages arrive, and I hope to get some more females to add to my original collection!


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## scatterbrain (Dec 21, 2009)

So sorry to hear you lost your wee mouse so soon---Ecclie is still cute though! Nice pressie!


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## jo65 (Sep 22, 2009)

Sorry about what happened to baby Kallan, I can see why he was your fave. Your experience and photographs have taught me something I didn't know about two of my own mice. I just thought they were marked and I did not have the experience to determine the ins and outs of actual type (although it never stopped me trying to label them). Ecclie is the same as my Circe (fondly known as C.C. the fat mouse), except she also has a white spot on the head. So even though she has three colours, she is still a black fox? And this is due to the white belly, is that right?


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## Kallan (Aug 16, 2009)

Hi Jo,

I am new to this myself but as far as I know a black fox is black on top with a white underbelly. Ecclie is badly marked as he has a white spot on his head, and rather than a clear differentiation between black and white he has tan all along the sides of his belly.

I suspect unnamed young mouse was a combination of multiple colour genes, I haven't quite learned those yet!


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## Cait (Oct 3, 2008)

Ecclie looks like a black tan in the photos, not a fox. He also has a spotting gene, so you could call him a black tan broken. The other mouse looks dove broken, which makes sense if he is the remaining mouse's son (dove is just PE black). So you can infer, if they are related, that your remaining mouse carries PE dilution and is heterozygous tan (I couldn't see tan on the photo of the dove broken).


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## Kallan (Aug 16, 2009)

Ecclie is entirely white underneath, the tan is only along the demarcation of the white and black.


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## jo65 (Sep 22, 2009)

C.C. only has the tan line at the demarkation between black and white too and her sister has no tan at all, just black with white underside but to prevent confusion I think I will stick to the 'heinz 57' breed lol.


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## julieszoo (May 27, 2009)

As I understand it if a fox cannot show any tan colour, so your mouse is not genetically a fox. That intermediate belly colour with the tan around the edge is called otter in other species but is not standardised in mice. He's cute though, I have a pet mouse with very similar colours.


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## Kallan (Aug 16, 2009)

What about this one?

http://www.hiiret.fi/eng/breeding/varie ... k_fox.html

This is the site i had looked at to try and determine what mine were :lol:


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## Toast (Nov 11, 2009)

Ecclie is a very hansome boy. Oh, no name is such a hansome little boy. I love him. His story is so sad.


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## Raindropmousery (Jan 10, 2010)

Shame about your little boy, males often fight unfortunatly. The black male you have looks like a missmarked black tan as black fox have white bellys.


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