246 



The Journal of Heredity 



A PURE ALBINO FEMALE ( MUTANT A i 

 White skins are in demand for children's furs, and breeding pure white sl<unks is not an impossi- 

 bility. The photograph above was taken from a mounted specimen in possession of the Skunk 

 De\'eIopment Bureau. (Fig. 4.) 



tans other than the butyl found in the 

 skunk. These trials are only another 

 proof of the extremely sensitive testing 

 apparatus we have in the olfactory 

 sense — far more delicate than the 

 spectroscope, as Aldrich states. 



MARKET DEMANDS SOLID BLACK SKINS 



There are also genetic problems of 

 much imiiortance and of more difficulty 

 than the prf)blems of simple manage- 

 ment. The normal wild skimk shows 

 two white stripes of varying extent, but 

 the fashion demands a solid black or 

 something as near that as possible. 

 There is no doubt but that selective 

 breeding can reduce the proportions 

 of this white pattern, and gi\e races 

 with at least only a small patch of 

 white on the crown of the head — the 

 so-called star black. A high grade 



star male in our experiment was 

 mated to an albino whose pattern 

 factors were of course unknown. The 

 offspring were of the ^■ery high grade 

 (see Fig. 7) like the sire. One of these 

 showed a split star in which only a 

 small patch on each side of the head 

 remained. This is the highest grade 

 individual we have e\er seen (Fig. 3). 

 We know of no imperative or inherent 

 reason why a mutation to self-black 

 should not occur, in which the factor 

 (or factors?) for white stripes would 

 be eliminated. vSuch a form should then 

 breed true to self-black and thus solve 

 one of the most perplexing problems 

 of skunk breeding. We have received 

 records of such forms but none have 

 been tested genetically to our knowl- 

 edge. 



