Hey Rich, aren't you the one who found the first caramel?
As I recall, he found it at a pet store back in 1983.
~Doug
Not exactly in that fashion.
I was in a little mom and pop pet store in Cape Coral, Florida where the shop had a bunch of local wild caught normal corns in a tank. One of them had a pretty interesting straw colored ground color, so I bought it and brought it back home to use in breedings. I mated it to an amelanistic, as I wanted to see what amelanism would do with that straw colored background, but of course got all normals the first generation.
If I remember this correctly, the next generation I just got a bunch of Amelanistics and of course some normals. The amelanistics seemed lighter colored and more yellow than normal, but nothing really much to write home about. I ALMOST sold off the entire lot to them to a guy who stopped by here looking to buy some stuff. But I decided to hang onto them to breed them instead. Turned out to be a lucky decision, I guess. I kept the normals and amels and bred them together, just to mix it up a bit even though they were all siblings.
That next generation was when I got what I thought were odd looking snows and some others that just seemed drab and colorless looking. I thought it was just a variation of anerythrism since I had what also seemed like a variation of snow corns. Well, those "snows" turned out to be Butter Corns, and the drab looking ones are what we now know as Caramels. Of course, I had to spend the time to breed these to anerythristics and snows to try to determine whether they were, in fact, just a variation of that known anerythristic gene. And surprisingly they were not. So I had something new to play with.
But funny how Murphy's Law can toy with you in this stuff.... Why didn't I get Butters and Caramels that second generation? Statistically I should have, and little did I know that this would pretty much be par for the course through all the later years of my breedings with those critters. Don't count on the expected to happen. And expect the unexpected at every turn. And don't expect to be able to explain everything that you see.
