# Mom scraping cage harmful to new babies?



## Mamoo1218 (Jul 27, 2013)

Guess I'll start with our story.. In June, we visited a pet store to get my son a hamster. We ended up putting a new litter of 3 baby rats on hold. I researched all I could, since I was not familiar with caring for rats, and about 4 weeks later we brought home the 3 ‘brothers’. The guy who helped us said he owned many rats, and confirmed that they were all male, stating that they sometimes hold their boy parts in when they are scared. When I saw two of the boys trying to mount the other, I separated them and brought them to the vet the next day, on August 14, only to discover one was a sister! I guess I thought/hoped that she was too young to have babies, even as she got a little rounded, and I felt little flutters in her tummy. 21 days later I checked on her and-surprise!- she was having contractions. Well, I sat with her while she had 11 tiny pink cuties, and she is the best mom ever  She does, however, want to get the heck out of the aquarium I have them in, and has been scraping off the glue and stuff in the corners and on the edges of the tank. My question is are all of those tiny black pieces going to harm the babies? I clean the tank best I can when my daughter can take mom into the other room, but she freaks if I completely clean her nest. Meanwhile, they are crawling around on them, and I find tiny black specks on them. When can I move all of them to a new cage, and should I even bother right now with the momma protecting that nest?


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