After 17 years in the gopher control business, we had an interesting "first" today--actually two "firsts" on the same day and from the same jobsite in San Francisco. Pictured to the right are an albino pocket gopher, a melanistic(black) pocket gopher, and a normally colored gopher for comparison. While we see a lot of variation in coloration on the gophers we catch, we have never seen an albino, and we've never seen a melanistic gopher as jet black in color as this specimen.
About 2 weeks after we picked up the gophers above, we caught a second albino at the same job site. This time it was a large adult male. Clearly there is some interesting genetics going on at this particular location.
