100% white?! What?!

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Jessykah

Jessykah

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REW doe's background: REW, castor, black, Cali, blue, otter, broken

Black otter buck's background: black, blue, castor, otter, broken

Doe kindled 5 whites. :shock: Does this seem weird to you? I don't see any white in the buck's pedigree. Yes it can be farther back and can make white pop up, especially when bred to a white doe. But all 5 being white seems not likely to me. Though, I know next to NOTHING about genetics yet. The doe was bred by someone else before sold to me, so I am wondering if maybe the wrong ped was sent to me for the buck by mistake (I don't want to ask him yet, as he's extremely busy and I thought I'd ask here first). Rex breed. What do you think?
 
Jessykah":163uy8sk said:
REW doe's background: REW, castor, black, Cali, blue, otter, broken

Black otter buck's background: black, blue, castor, otter, broken

Doe kindled 5 whites. :shock: Does this seem weird to you? I don't see any white in the buck's pedigree.
Click to expand...
The "c" for REW is recessive, so rabbits can carry it despite being fully colored themselves and pass it on for generations without being noticed (until bred to another rabbit with a "c"). The likelihood of all 5 kits in the litter being white might have been slim, but it's possible. Kind of like how we understand that there should be roughly 50% male and 50% female, but in any given litter you might have 2 males and 7 females, or vice versa. The numbers balance out in the grand scheme of things when you calculate all the kits ever produced.

:)
 
I got a pair of chocolate mini rex with very long 20 gen pedigrees when I started. All blue, black, lilac, and chocolate the whole way. Buck produced a harlequin with my red after a few years. :lol: REW is one of the most recessive, most obvious, and most common genes. Practically everything potentially carries it so you should almost never rule it out. Pedigrees also don't list siblings and my chocolates could have had harlis all over their background without it showing up on paper.

As for odds.... Sometimes it just happens. Even when you have a gene with 25% odds you can get some litters that are 50-75% that color or sometimes you get litters without a dominant color that should have higher than a 50% chance. We are talking about the overall average chance a gene should appear in 100s of offspring. Not guarantees. The actual results in a small example of even a few litters frequently leads people to incorrect assumptions or theories about genetics and breeding.
 

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