Richard Zweifel had a paper in the Journal of Heredity in 1982. It has a good discussion of striped and some preliminary info about some other mutants.

Bern Bechtel had a piece about albino, but I do not remember where it was printed.

I call black and white with a banded pattern wild type. It is also called desert phase.

Coastal phase is brown and pale yellow with a banded pattern. I do not know whether that is a single mutant or not.

Striped is a dominant mutant gene with variable expression.

There are probably several independent mutants that affect pattern in addition to the striped mutant. Zweifel had a couple but hadn't worked out the inheritance. The 50-50 black and white banding may be one, and I've seen pictures of kings with very narrow white bands. Wide striped may be a combination of striped and whatever produces 50-50 banding. I have no clue to inheritance of any of them.

It would not surprise me if many of the mutants had several different names in the trade.

A friend of mine mated a wild type with a poorly striped Cal king that had normal coloration. Among the babies were an albino and a baby with pink eyes and skin that was about two thirds as dark as normal. Probably two different mutant genes, both recessive to their normal counterparts.

I am not aware of a web site with an organized list of Cal king mutants, but I haven't looked hard, either. Someday ....

Paul Hollander

[ Show Entire Thread ]