I recently became aware via the RDR site that an abnormally high number of caramel balls have kinks in their spines, including some wild-bred animals.
I'm thinking the wild bred cases would tend to weigh in against it just being a case of captive inbreeding with a few founder imports that happened to have an unrelated and unlinked kinking gene.
One theory is that kinking can be caused by excess water being absorbed by the egg and that caramel lines come from a dryer area and their eggs need to be incubated dryer. I've produced a few kinked animals myself including a couple albino balls and they did tend to be the eggs that where a little over wet so I'm still working on the perfect borderline dry mixture of vermiculite.
What I'm trying to find out is if het and possible het caramels also tend to kink more. If it's just the caramels, then I'm wondering if whatever protean is messed up to give them the caramel appearance is also causing the kinking. Hopefully the dryer medium might help even if it is the caramel gene its self making them more susceptible.
