I am Brian. I am the breeder and the record keeper behind this site. The colony started in late 2018 with a handful of orphaned baby roof rats in Southern California, moved with my family to Florida some years later, and has run for about eight years and many generations since. As far as I am aware, it is the only domesticated colony of this species in existence.
What I am
A breeder and an observer. I choose the pairings, raise the litters, socialize the young, weigh and photograph and write down what happens, and decide which lines carry forward. Nearly everything on this site that is specific to the roof rat comes out of that work rather than out of a textbook, because for this species most of the textbook is about a different animal.
What I am not
I am not a veterinarian. Nothing here is veterinary advice, and I am not in a position to advise on rats I have not raised. If your animal is sick, see a vet who can examine it.
I am not a geneticist or a research scientist by training. What I am is the kind of hobbyist who, given a project, will track it carefully. I read the papers, I cite them, and I say plainly when a result comes from mice or from Norway rats rather than from roof rats. Where I have tested something in my own animals, I say so. Where I am guessing, I try to say that too, which is why there is an open questions page at all.
I also do not write the software. The pages, the registry, the pedigree certificates and the colony tools are built by Claude, an AI assistant, working to my direction. My part of that is the science, the voice, and deciding what is safe to publish. I read what goes up before it goes up, and the errors that survive that reading are mine.
How the records are made
Every rat here is tracked by hand. Each animal has a record carrying its parents, its birth date, its coat and its coat genetics, and its weights taken across its life. Every mating goes down with its date. Every litter goes down with its size and with what became of it. I photograph the animals as they grow, because a colour written out in words is not enough to settle later what that colour actually was. Illness, injury, temperament and the things that went wrong go into the same record, which is the only reason the lessons from failures page could be written.
Every rat that is placed leaves with a pedigree drawn from those records, showing its lineage and coat genetics, and, where we have it, a behavioural record. The colony database itself is private, because it holds other keepers’ animals as well as mine. What is meant for the public is the registry, the articles and the science pages.
How to reach me
Through the contact page. I am one person doing this alongside running the colony, so replies take a while, but I read every serious inquiry and I answer it.