One instance is worthy of detailed comment. An adult female, no. 783
Ohio State Museum, taken on January 31, 1931, at Vinton, Meigs County,
Ohio, bears the following notation on the attached label "nest plowed
out of ground. Very small young escaped--marked like parent. [F] was
nursing." The enlarged mammae on the dried skin substantiate the
statement that the female was nursing young. She has a brown mask
continuous from one ear through the eye, across the forehead and
through the other eye to the opposite ear. On each side of the body a
stripe of brown 5 to 10 mm. wide extends from the upper part of the
foreleg back to the thigh and base of the tail, uniting there with its
opposite and covering the tail. There are a few spots of brown on the
shoulders, and rump and one on the middle of the back. Otherwise the
specimen is white. One implication of the statement on the label that
the young which escaped were marked like the parent (presumably this
female parent) is that this female is a partial albino. I am more
inclined, however, to the view that there was an unseasonable activity
of the particular glands of internal secretion the hormones of which
promote embryonic growth and that these glands, or others controlled
by them, were in some way responsible for an abnormal progress of molt,
or for a reversal of molt in that one molt began before the previous
molt had been completed.
Excepting this one specimen, no. 783 from Vinton, Ohio, all of those in
transitional pelage indicate that the direction of the molt pattern is
the same as in _M. frenata_ and _M. erminea_. That is to say, the
autumnal molt begins on the midventral line and the molt in spring
begins on the mid-dorsal line. Furthermore, the normal progress of each
molt appears to follow the same pattern that has been described above
for _Mustela frenata_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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