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T O P I C R E V I E W
Snakesitter
Posted - 23/01/2014 : 20:27:34 At Living Gems, we keep very detailed records of weights and growth over time. Accordingly, I have a pretty good idea what babies normally weigh -- according to those records, ranging from a low of 24 grams to a high of 36 grams over the 83 babies for which I have records, with an average of 30.1 and a standard deviation of 2.8.
Last December, Agate surprised me by dropping a litter of only a few very large babies. These “little ones” ranged from 41 grams to 46 grams, with an average of 43.6.
In statistics, “…nearly all values lie within three standard deviations of the mean in a normal distribution” (Wikipedia). All prior experience seems to suggest such a normal distribution, with babies (excluding split-sack twins) falling closely grouped around their average.
These babies, however, weighed *4.8* standard deviations about the norm.
To illustrate this, I pulled two baby drawers: Baby #A-07 from our first litter of the year, and Baby #C-07 from this new litter:
Here they are side by side:
And, in closer shots:
Note they were almost the same size…even though Litter A was 5.5 months old at the time…and Litter C only less than two weeks old.
Even more mysterious, Agate seems to have dropped early. Her POS to delivery time was only 108 days, and the babies visually supported this by their distended bellies, less developed colors, and the fact that one was born with a small unabsorbed yolk sack:
I spoke with several other breeders, none of whom could recall a litter like this. Thus, I’d like to cast a broader net: have any other rainbow breeders seen results like this?
