Mice may seem cute in the cartoons, but when they’re scurrying across your kitchen floor in the middle of the night, you will think differently. Rodents such as mice gain entry into your home to seek warmth, food, shelter and nesting material for their babies. Once they start breeding, you have a real problem on your hands because they multiply at an alarming rate.
Mice won’t stop at furniture and appliances. They’ll eat your food, your pets’ food, wiring, insulation, clothing, you name it. On top of all that, they can contaminate your food sources, as they carry diseases in their urine and droppings, plus they can even transmit lice.
How Do You Know You Have Mice in Your Home?
Mice may multiply fast, but they also know how to stay hidden from view for quite some time. Some signs that may alert you to their presence include:
- Scratching sounds in the walls.
- Weird smells
- Bars of soap with scratch or gnaw marks in them
- Scratch or bite marks virtually anywhere else, such as furniture
- Droppings
- Grease marks
- Urine pillars
How Often Can Mice Reproduce?
Mice have a gestational period of between 19 and 21 days. Females get pregnant five to 10 times every year and can birth a litter of anywhere from three to 14 pups. Average litter sizes range from six to eight pups. So this means that one female mouse can produce between 32 and 56 pups in a single year!
Females can start reproducing immediately after they give birth, with new litters popping up within just 25 days. If that weren’t bad enough, female baby mice can start reproducing at six weeks, having pups of their own pretty quickly -- about 10 litters per year.
Even just two mice that get into your home can produce 60 pups in a year. Of those new mice, 21 to 30 are female mice, which means they can have babies within a month. If you do the math, this could result in more than 5,000 mice in just a year! It’s really mind boggling.
How Long Can Mice Live?
The average life-span for a mouse is one year in the outdoors. Mice that hide out in your house can live between two and three years. So you may assume you could just wait out one mouse to die. But what about their babies, and their babies, and so on?
In the wild, mice are an important link in the food chain. They are fed on by large birds. Mice in turn feed on insects to stay alive. So outdoors, mice serve an important role in the circle of life. Inside your home, though, it’s a different story. You can’t allow them to bring disease and destruction into your house.
Call Frontino if You Suspect a Mouse Infestation
If you have a mouse infestation on your hands, call Frontino Pest Control at 602-338-9223 for a consultation. We have vast experience eradicating anything from the common house mouse to rats and other rodents.