Yep, one of them had a few patchy swirls of pale orange marbled into the backstraps, and even a hint in the front belly slab.

Not all white kings are pure white. Some are mosaics, or chimeras, where some of the cells have the ability to store B-carotene while the rest do not.

Mosaics occur throughout the animal kingdom... yes even humans.

MOSAIC: A chimera; a tissue containing two or more genetically distinct cell types or an individual composed of such tissues

One such a condition is anhidrotic ectodermal dysplasia. Males carrying the responsible allele (let us call it d ) in its hemizygous condition have no sweat glands. A heterozygous (D/d ) female has a mosaic of D and d sectors across her body, as shown in Figure 2-32 .

I once posted a pic I lifted from another website that shows a human mosiac with strikingly marbled skin, but I can't seem to find it in any searches of my old posts. I did come across this pearl from 2005 (06-07-05)

A genetic mosaic is a creature whose body is built of a mixture of cells of two or more different genotypes. Some of the cells have the genes that code for white flesh while other cells have the genes that code for red flesh. For a wild salmon to have this, it would probably mean the same egg was fertilized by two different sperm. (That's not too far fetched when you consider the spawning orgies salmonids are known for... anyone remember those cool x-rated spawning videos from last year's board?)

This condition happens naturally but it can also be artificially induced. Geneticists have developed a strain of tetragenic mice (four parents) that are used in animal research.

Mosaic mouse:


Here's a mosaic pigeon: