is that the babies were the result of old sperm from the Jungle last season. The Y chromosome sperm may have been weaker, and not have done its job. This account for the slugs. The X chromosome sperm is stronger and resulted in all female offspring.



Because the Hypos look like Jungles, and there are What appear to be Jungles and definately Normals present I do not think Parthenogenisis is the case, I could be wrong though.



I do think something happened to the stored sperm that caused the Pattern change.

In fact, here is an idea that just came to me.

Pattern anomolies have been attributed to change in the environment (temperature) during pregnancy. What if the change in temperature your Hypo female experienced during the rest of the year affected the Sperm? We also KNOW that high temperatures decrease fertility, so the sperm she had stored was likely destroyed (Y) or affected in another way (X).



One of the people I work with has a Macaw and she said they had a chromosome analysis done to find out its sex. DNA is present in blood, so I imagine a viable blood sample from the slugs could give you this information.



There is one problem I could see. Are slugs JUST OVA, or were they improperly fertilized and died EARLY? If they were at one point fertilized ova (even if the sperm was bad) then my theory might work. If they are only bad OVA then this will not work, as they do not have the chromosome pairs from the sperm.

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