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Ancestor: Scraping Mice

Size: 65mm - 105mm, tail included.

Dietary Needs: They can barely survive and breed on a very meagre diet of seeds, grains and other plantstuff of the lowest quality, as they can't compete with larger (nearly all) species. They also survive but not thrive on the faecal matter of some other animals, particularly herbivores like rabbits. But when it's available they will always go first for the nests of birds and mammals to harvest meat from helpless young, even though it's more risky. When they converge on a food source by smell they can go into a feeding frenzy, where they will remain as a group and keep seeking sources of food as a mob long after the initial source has been consumed. They can kill and eat adult members of other mouse species in their path when in such large numbers and in the frenzy state.

Life Cycle: These mice live communally and breed year-round. Females have only a short amount of time not in oestrus, between each week of being in oestrus. When there is not enough food to go around and the mice get competitive, females experience an extended anestrus until they put on enough body fat to support reproduction. Several generations can occur in one year, on a good year. These mice can potentially live for up to 5 years, but 1 is more usual.

A high intake of animal protein results in more successful mating and larger litter sizes. Populations can explode after successful group feeding frenzies.

The young mice start off helpless, blind and furless, but within a week they are following their mother around, keeping nose-to-tail in a chain. They will even follow her to harvests, learning very early in life how to survive. Those who can't quickly pick up on the subtleties of avoiding detection are quickly selected against. Within a month they will be fully grown and might even have their own pups.

Other: A bird returns to it's nest. It's chicks are covered in deep lesions and gouges, and they are mix of dead and dying. The nest death mice have been feeding.

These mice are very tiny and very silent. Birds, other mice, rabbits, even cats are not safe from these nest invaders. The mice don't infest the nest themselves, but if a nest has a quick escape route, inattentive parents or some other advantage to the mice, they will leave a urine trail to it and return to it frequently to harvest chunks of meat. This is when they breed prolifically and when their numbers really explode.

Despite being small, these mice are tested to use their brains often. They have to assess patterns of behaviour from their target's parents and determine the timings of their arrival and departure. They have to judge if offspring are too large and attentive to harvest from (or even safe to encounter at all). They even judge the depth of the parents sleeping by breathing rhythm and facial expressions. They live life on a knife edge. There are always plenty of host parents that are too sharp-witted for these mice, and many of the mice meet their end caught in the act of trying to harvest.

Once wounded hosts have a high chance of mortality from the resulting wound infection even if they are not bitten again because the mouse's saliva is full of different kinds of bacteria including faecal bacteria. Intensively harvested hosts may die of blood loss before infection takes over.