Astrex

Young blue astrex baby

The astrex mouse has a curly coat which relaxes into waves as the mouse ages. Ion recent years it has not been a very popular variety on the show bench due to the difficulty of breeding a good specimen. The curls tend to look best on very young babies, perhaps around 3-5 weeks of age, who are too young to show. By the time we would usually be showing a normal mouse at 7 weeks the astrex has already begun to lose some of its curls! Adults sometimes look like a bedraggled normal mouse rather than an astrex until you look at the whiskers, which are curly too. The goal of breeding astrex is to breed a mouse that retains strong waves or curls in its coat into adulthood.

At the present time there are many genes responsible for curly coats, in the same way that there are many different genes for degrees and types of hairlessness. The one which causes the astrex mutation has been around for quite a long time, although it has not become popular with serious fanciers.

As the astrex mouse has not been a popular variety it has been neglected, and not much advice on it exists. The best method is probably to continue to select the curliest specimens in adulthood and breed only from those. The problem with this is that the breeder will have to keep more mice than he otherwise might have into adulthood, to see whether or not the coat stays curly.

There are two genes which cause an astrex coat, one gene recessive and one dominant. The usual gene found in astrex is the dominant one, meaning that some of the litter will be straight coated and therefore not needed for breeding. It also means that outcrossing can be accomplished more quickly than with the recessive form.

Young blue astrex