Skip to content

WeighingMice

Kravitz Lab edited this page Mar 18, 2026 · 4 revisions

Mice will gain ~1-2g per week on HFD, and remain mostly stable (<1g per week) on Chow. If you see large swings in body weight consider that your weights are likely not accurate. Some failure modes include:

  • Using different weighing scales - different scales (even the same model) can be off by ~1g, so if you swap scales between days you will add noise here.
  • Check that the scale is tared to 0 between each weighing - if the scale tare "drifts" during your weighing it will introduce systematic errors.
  • Scales can be inaccurate if placed in a hood with the air on. Turn the air off while weighing.
  • The scale can sometimes touch something like a notebook, giving an improper reading. Make sure there is nothing nudged up against the scale while weighing.
  • Mice move around, making it hard to get an accurate weight.

The best way to deal with all of this is to enter weights into a Google Drive sheet as you weigh them, and use formulas to calculate the food eaten as you weigh them - if you get numbers that don't make sense (as in yellow below), you can re-weigh the food right away, or make a note of it if the weighing seems accurate but not plausible.

Example of a weighing scheme in Google Drive
image

🧠 Home


πŸ“˜ General Information

EHS and DCM procedures

🐭 Animal policies


πŸ§ͺ Experimental Protocols

Weighing mice and food

βœ‚οΈ Intracranial Surgical Protocols

βœ‚οΈ Other Surgical Protocols

🩸 Blood collection

🍬 Glucose tolerance testing

Intracranial injections

🧬 Biomolecular protocols

Von Frey testing

🧬 Virus Injections

πŸ’‘ Photometry

Acquisition

Analysis

In vivo electrophysiology

πŸ§ͺ Pharmacology

Behavior Chambers

Bonsai workflows

πŸ”¬ Histology

Microscopy


Devices

πŸ› οΈ Arduino

Sippers

Tumble Feeder

Social Door


πŸ“Š Data Analysis

Electrophysiology

Ex Vivo

In Vivo


πŸŽ₯ Imaging

Miniscopes

1P Imaging with Mightex OASIS


🧱 Miscellaneous Tools

Clone this wiki locally