What kinds of natural identifiers do we have to go by with ferrets?  I'm
asking you all to take a look at your babies' faces.  Last night on "Animal
Planet" I watched a program detailing studies of lions in the Serengheti.
At first the researchers--who were interested in pride behavior--would draw
face outlines and detail notches in ears that the lions obtained in their
various disputes with each other to keep track of each lion.  These were
updated on a regular basis and could be seen with binoculars when tracking
individual prides.  But it sometimes got difficult to maintain the changes
and updates got lost.  Lo and behold, they found that the most reliable
permanent marker was the PATTERN of the whiskers on the faces of the lions.
It turned out that there is a strong genetic component to this.  So I
checked fuzzballs Bonnie and Clyde, and lo and behold, the black whiskers
show up nicely on their light muzzles and there is a difference in the two!
 
Bonnie has seven rows: 1, 4, 1blk/3wh, 3, 5, 4, 2 whiskers in the
consecutive rows, top to bottom (you can catch them napping to do this).
 
Clyde has five rows (Maybe 6--not sure yet): 4, 4, 5, 4, 6 whiskers in the
consecutive rows.
 
I plan to make my counts a few times to be sure I'm not missing any.  What
do you see?  Wouldn't this be a neat way to keep track?  I'd love to hear
from people with litters if there are any family data on this.  I'm a
biology teacher and this would be a neat genetics problem to present to
students, but I don't have any ferret families to look at and my two are not
related as far as I know.
 
GailBobBonnieClyde
[Posted in FML issue 2000]