How many white spots does a Key deer fawn have?

Finding nothing in the literature, we took it upon ourselves to provide a scientific answer.  Using dozens of “full side view” Key deer fawn photos taken over the years by our President Valerie Preziosi, we counted a surprisingly narrow range of 120 to 130 spots per side. We did not at all expect such a tight range! Considering there must be some counting error such as when 2 spots seem to merge into 1, the tight range is amazing. So doubling the number to account for both sides, the answer to our question above is 240 – 260 spots for a Key deer baby. For full-sized mainland white tail deer we found two references listing an average of 300. So the number of spots is another physical (and hence genetic) feature that differentiates the Key deer subspecies from their ancestors.