Does the generation stat show a reliable indication of a roo's generation? I was looking at my best coat so far and its a gen 5, so I spent a while and mapped out it's entire family tree. At its furthest, its 9 generations from Levio and Dawnara. 37 different gen 2 roos went in to making my gen 5 cinder.

After reading Catherine's blogs about community and fellowship, I really get the feeling that the roos have been designed around sharing. I also read about other people's frustration at lack of results and was wondering if peoples gene pools are really that wide at the base? If you don't have success with getting the rarer coats, and I'm not talking Masked, Nile and Savanna from gen 2 winecoats, but the top end of the Gael and Pine species. Maybe look back through your lineage to see how many different roos your current herd comes from.

After looking through the whole lineage I found there was a little inbreeding in the paternal line, most in the paternal great grandfather and great, great grandfather and a touch in the parternal great, great grandmother. But the rest was a wide base of roos from about about 16 different breeders, going on naming conventions.

Maybe look at your own non productive roos and see how wide your lineage is right back at the beggining. One tip when writing the tree out on paper, spread the start of your tree out as much as possible, it gets very crowded by the time you get to great, great, great, great grandparents.

Of course I could be wrong and just hit lucky, but we have had quite a bit of success in the five weeks we've been playing this. I've read about line breeding, and back breeding and pit breeding, each will get you specific results. But from talkig to other breeders, typically the genetic potential is limited. Only a few breeders I have spoken to share outside thier fellowship. The most frequent addition to a gene pool, by breeders is the aquisition of a specific trait or coat.

In nature diverity is driven by predators or environmental factors. Typical survival rates for wild mammals is very low, most successful animals breed fast and in large litters so that some of its offspring survive. Meeroos are immortal so there are no predators eating the bright blue ones. My point is nature produces a huge variety of animals from it's genetic code. Maybe this is the way forward, after all a billion different insect species can't be wrong.

On an amusing note (and my maths may be wrong) but hypothetically, if Levio and Dawnara only had 10 nests as normal roos, and each of those 10 children had ten nests, and so on, at gen 14 (around 3 months) we would have about a quadrillion meeroos in SL, thats enough to fill 15 BILLION full size sims. Never dying, just endlessly chirruping...