| I'd say it is the exception rather than any rule. I have no personal experience with this phenomena or know of a breeder who produces it. As I mentioned it must be some type of piebald pattern we are seeing possibly lined to hormonal development. It is too much for the marginal spreading we see as flesh/dermis gets thicker with age. And it is the head area that is most perplexing as that is the thinest dermis of all with no subdermal tissue?
There are many oddities in koi genetics. One is the kanako pattern, a genetic variation/mutation of the complete kohaku pattern. Kanoko is unstable. But I have personally seen a shiro muji grow to reveal a full kanoko pattern and then loose it again a few years later . The assumption of course is that the erythrophores ( red/orange) cells appeared. But did they? Or did the leucophores ( white) disappear, revealing the underlying pattern?
JR |