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After three attempts to breed this pair, I finally succeeded in obtaining a small fertile clutch which resulted in eight
maternally incubated hatchlings, one of which was very dark and almost patternless. This was, to my knowledge, the first
patternless dark baby hatched in the US and set the stage for the high interest in subsequent patternless hatchlings from myself
and other breeders.
The enjoyment of these beautiful babies was short-lived when a mysterious problem caused massive losses to the 1999 clutches
that spring and early summer. Never conclusively indentified, the symptoms of kidney failure, regurgitation, and convulsions
followed by death were identified by Dr. Scott Stahl as consistent with poisoning from flea medication. I didn't use any such
product around my rodents, but had obtained some frozen rodents from a new local source.
Quite happily, the patternless baby was one of three survivors and developed into Calico Junior (GM-99-09). This second-generation
calico male verified that the calico trait was in fact heritable in offspring, although probably not a simple recessive gene.
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