Quote Originally Posted by RandyRemington View Post
A breeder I know had some interesting results with his genetic stripe pair. I don't have any pictures but as I remember the parents are pretty good stripes. Maybe not perfectly unbroken but then again it's been years since I saw them and one or the other might even be perfect.

The first year he bred them ALL of the babies came out with lots of side pattern. You could tell they weren’t normals but at the time I didn't even know genetic stripes could look like that because you never used to see posted pictures with that much side pattern. The next time he bred the SAME pair ALL of the babies where much cleaner striped than the first clutch.

This got me thinking that there might be an environmental factor. One of the old books used to talk about non genetic striping due to extreme development temperature (can't remember if cool or hot). If temp differences can cause a non genetic striped animal to stripe maybe they can affect the degree of striping in genetic stripes?

However, I've posted inquiries about this several time and an experienced genetic stripe breeder reported that he actually tried different incubation temperatures and didn't find that it made a difference. Another theory was posted that genes in the pair affected the quality of stripe and it just happened to work out that the first clutch all got the genetics for side pattern and the ones in the 2nd clutch didn't.

I'm still considering the possibility that there is an environmental variable and something about the one year produced different looking stripes than the other. Maybe it could be affected by diet or even the temp of the mother before the eggs are laid. But if people are consistently seeing divergent stripe types through selective breeding this would tend to point toward genetics over environment.

Does EBN also breed for unbroken stripes in a separate line? If the same feeding, housing, and incubation regiment can consistently produce broken stripes from one line and unbroken stripes from another that would be a strong argument in favor of genetics being the determining factor in stripe type. Otherwise how do we know that maybe there is something about EBN's environment that just happens to favor the breaks (not saying it's necessarily anything good or bad about husbandry, could be something as simple as feeding brand X vs. brand Y rat chow or how wet you think incubation media should or should not be).
Very interesting.