  Diagonal and off-diagonal flavor and conserved charge susceptibilities reveal
the prevalent degrees of freedom of heated strongly interacting matter. Results
obtained from lattice simulations are compared with various model estimates in
an effort to weed down various possible pictures of a quark gluon plasma. We
argue that the vanishing of the off-diagonal quark flavor susceptibilities and
its derivatives with respect to chemical potential, at temperatures above
1.5Tc, can only be understood in a picture of a gas or liquid composed of
quasi-particles which carry the same quantum numbers as quarks and antiquarks.
A potential new observable, blind to neutral and non-strange particles, is
introduced and related via isospin symmetry to the ratio of susceptibilities of
baryonic strangeness to strangeness generated in the excited matter created at
RHIC.
