$misfits{$stand}{$mother}{$offspring}

You probably want: 

$misfits->{$stand}{$mother}{$offspring}

[download]

Without the arrow, Perl thinks you want to access a hash %misfits, not a hash reference (how should it disambiguate?), and thus use strict is complaining...

In reply to Re: Growing a Hash of Hashes via its reference by almut
in thread Growing a Hash of Hashes via its reference by Henri

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