kusanar314
Well-known member
Broken isn't recessive, so the buck being broken is why you got broken kits, her not being broken means she is enen meaning not carrying the broken. 1 copy of En gives broken, 2 copies give Charlie.
Close-up hair photos for banding/ticking
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The agouti gene (coded 'A') is a switch that turns on special patterning. The dominant choice is agouti patterning, wild rabbit color, with white eye rings, light inside the ears, light belly, and bands on the hair shaft. As @reh has pointed out, the bands consist of a dark tip (either black or its dilute color blue, or chocolate or its dilute color lilac) colored with the dark eumelanin, then the agouti switch flips and the pigment changes to the yellowish pheomelanin for a while, and then the switch flips again and the color goes back to the dark eumelanin shade (often in a more dilute form, so the black tips of a chestnut agouti become slate gray in the last band, called the 'undercolor' in the ARBA Standard of Perfection.)
I couldn't understand how the outer hair could be chestnut if there is nothing but a black tip and slate gray base with a yellowish band inbetween. That made no sense. The Standard calls for a chestnut surface color, but when you pull out an individual hair, there is no chestnut band. What???? Then I had an idea. I took some black angora, and some fawn angora (which is just the yellowish pheomelanin color), and carded them together.
Voila! Sure enough, the eye blends those two colors as an optical illusion, and you see the brown shade. Fawn is on the left, black on the right, the brownish shades between are blends of the two. (I did the same thing with a bit of blue wool and some yellow wool, carded together the eye blends the two and it looks green.)
It's a fascinating optical illusion. There's really no brown or green involved here, the eye just blends the colors, like pixels in a television.
Anyway, normal agouti rabbits will have a yellowish triangle on the neck behind the ears, and the yellowish band on the hairshaft. Non-agouti rabbits, the recessive 'aa', are sometimes called 'self' patterned, because the entire rabbit looks the same color all over itself. No eye rings, no banding, no triangle behind the ears, no white inside the ear. Tan, coded 'a(t)', is halfway between the two. The bunnies have the agouti markings with the eye rings and light inside the ears and the triangle, but the hair is not banded.
So, if you see a baby rabbit that looks blue, black, chocolate or lilac, but has white inside the ears, you know it isn't a self aa. So that elimiinates one possibility. Now we need to figure out whether that kit is a tan-pattern otter or marten, or an agouti-pattern chinchilla or agouti. Once the coat begins to grow out, you have two things to look for:
- Is the fiber banded with a yellowish band? If so, you have an agouti rabbit. The color the rabbit was when it was newborn will be which shade of agouti it is. Black agouti is chestnut, blue agouti is opal, lilac agouti is lynx, chocolate agouti is just called chocolate agouti (amber in some breeds). If the rabbit has agouti markings, and a yellowish triangle behind the ears, but the hair has no banding, is all one color (which may gradually lighten towards the skin), you have a tan pattern rabbit 'a(t)_', called an 'otter'. Again, go with the birth color to determine which color of otter you have--blue, black, chocolate or lilac.
- Is the fiber banded with a silvery band instead? If so, you have a chinchilla or sable rabbit. It's still an agouti pattern, but both chinchilla and sable shut down the yellow pigment factories, so just plain silvery white is left in its place. Again, we use the birth color to determine which color name we add, a blue chinchilla is called a squirrel, black chin often just called chinchilla, chocolate and lilac chins just use that name. If the rabbit has the eye rings and light inside the ears and a silvery white triangle behind the ears, but no banding on the hair, then you have a tan pattern rabbit, which is called marten when combined with chin/sable.
a(t)a(t) and a(t)a will look tan.
aa will be non-agouti self
The chestnut coloration is an optical illusion, it is a mixture of the outer hair color and the middle yellowish band. To determine whether you are looking at black or chocolate based colors, use the newborn color. If you don't know what the newborn color was, look around the edge of the ears or the tip of an individual guard hair under magnification.
Just look to see if the band is yellowish (orange/fawn) or silvery white. Yellowish is agouti, chinchilla c(chd) will be silvery white. An easy place to look is the triangle behind the ears, it will be yellowish or silvery white.
C with any other color option will look full color
chinchilla c(chd) with sable, himi or albino as the second option, will still look chinchilla (although c(chd) c(chl) can muddy the banding some.
Dd and DD would look the same. If she is DD and bred to a dilute dd buck, the kits would all be Dd and look full dense color, as it takes two dd to make a dilute kit.
E(S) E(S) is a supersteel, and would look more like a self black. E(S) E is the proper steel genotype. E(S)e tends to look more black with poor ticking.
Spotting is actually a dominant trait, En En rabbits are called 'Charlies' and are mostly white with just a few small spots of color. En en rabbits are the standard broken. Normal non-spotted rabbits are en en, and they can't carry broken even if it is in their pedigree.
mrscllc
Active member
I didn't realize the en was a separate locus, not the same as E. Thank you for clarifying the dominance in that though. I believe currently all 3 of my broken rabbits would be considered less speckled than most, one of my smashed kits from earlier this week was the most colored broken we've had, as she was from a broken doe and chin buck. I will not breed my broken together anymore to see if I can get more color and better patterning on the kits. (Not that it matters for meat, but the genetics really fascinate me.)
mrscllc
Active member
Does it not work where two Dd could also produce a dilute dd? This may alter what I thought I understood about basic genetics if rabbits don't follow a regular pungent square genetic pattern.
I admit I'm still having trouble with the steel genes, so I'm shelfing that mentally until I get a grip a on the agouti conversations. Ha!
So, no broken born to 2 solid parents, but broken born to a solid and a broken, and Charlie to 2 broken?
mrscllc
Active member
So even with the orange triangle, all my kits were born black, so they would all be considered chestnut agouti. Oh, or steel when I get to that bit based on if they have banding or just tipping, correct?
I sae your example of this optical illusion on the other thread. It was a great expirement example!
mrscllc
Active member
So helpful. This entire post is very informative.
Steel is a type of agouti. ARBA uses the word 'tipping', as in Gold-tipped Steel and Silver-tipped Steel, because that is what the color looks like, you'd swear that the hair is tipped in gold or silver. In reality, what makes steel look different from regular E agouti, is that in steel the band is near the tip, and rather narrow. Both will have a dark tip, both will have a band. But the steel hairshaft will have the band compressed near the tip, with all the rest of the hair the undercolor. Regular chestnut will have the tip area and band spread out farther. Look at the examples by @reh, and see the balance of bands to compare.
mrscllc
Active member
This post is either one about steels or wideband modifiers. Here are 5 kits from the same litter. They have definitely grown into their coloring, as I believe @Alaska Satin mentioned Agouti rabbits tend to do. They are currently 11 weeks, but a good set for the banding conversation. This time I labeled each rabbit, added a mix of full body, blown coat, and hair on white and brown backgrounds.
In my understanding:
A is going to grow into a Chinchilla coloring(based on my current buck who lost his yellow band as he matured and it turned silver.) He is the first to start to lighten as they grew also. The others lightened and developed their banding later.
B,C,D are all chestnut agouti with different band widths.
E is a steel with some silvering as there is no yellow band in her fur, just dark tips and steel striping on the guard hairs making her appear ticked throughout, added with some silver hairs from shaft to tip.
The question for me is: do i understand it correctly when I say it is the wideband modifiers that change the width and depth of each band, making some of these chestnuts clearly more yellow in appearance. If so, how do these show on the genetic allele naming?
In my understanding:
A is going to grow into a Chinchilla coloring(based on my current buck who lost his yellow band as he matured and it turned silver.) He is the first to start to lighten as they grew also. The others lightened and developed their banding later.
B,C,D are all chestnut agouti with different band widths.
E is a steel with some silvering as there is no yellow band in her fur, just dark tips and steel striping on the guard hairs making her appear ticked throughout, added with some silver hairs from shaft to tip.
The question for me is: do i understand it correctly when I say it is the wideband modifiers that change the width and depth of each band, making some of these chestnuts clearly more yellow in appearance. If so, how do these show on the genetic allele naming?
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Not breeding the brokens together not only improves the color ratio, but it helps to avoid a problem that can occur with EnEn Charlies, called megacolon, where the digestive system gets messed up.
Sorry, I explained that poorly. Two Dd can certainly make a dilute--using the Punnet square you'd get 1/4 DD dense, 1/4 dd dilute, and the other half Dd dense but dilute carriers.
Solid to solid (en en) gives only solid.
Charlie to solid gives only En en brokens, this is the genetic for 'proper' brokens, and the entire litter would be broken.
Broken (En en) to solid should average half broken and half solid (although when Lady Luck gets involved, the actual ratio in any given litter could vary.)
mrscllc
Active member
Haha your quote of my post made me realize autocorrect on my phone made it say pungent.
Glad my biology isn't totally failing me from college years ago. I have pages upon pages of notes per locus based on these threads currently. I need to sort them so I don't lose the order of information since we are speaking of multiple genotype alleles at once.
mrscllc
Active member
This! I have a Himi doe that I bred to my chin agouti. The litter that just died was 4 solid white, 1 broken, 1 black otter(which I assume would have grown up agouti and not solid based on prior experience breeding this buck.) This means that she carries Enen under her himi, and the agouti buck is enen, correct?
That's a lot of yellow tones for a chinchilla, it will be interesting to see how it matures.
Do you have a photo of the Himi doe? Does she have white on her front toes, or are they all dark? What about the nose, any white? 'Booted' brokens have less than 10% white, often just a little white on the front feet (which is why they are called 'booted') and maybe a star or stripe on the face. Check the buck for white socks on the front feet, another possibility.
There are other things that can cause a broken pattern besides En spotting. Recessive Vienna blue-eyed-white can affect regular V coloration, causing 'Dutch-marked' rabbits with varying amounts of white. The Dutch broken pattern du also causes this pattern.
mrscllc
Active member
Here is his Sire when he was little and again as an adult. He had a large yellow band when he was younger but as he grew he lost the yellow in his banding and the orange triangle at the nape of his neck.
All four of her feet are indeed white.
He does not have white feet.
I haven't had any blue eyed whites yet, but I have alot of light grey/blue/mottled eyes in my black and agouti rabbits. I thought this came from the chinchilla gene. Bluish grey eyes, but not all are chins. For example, I have a Charlie doe from my broken buck and a broken lop eared doe, she has non agouti spots, but blue-grey eyes. Both parents have brown eyes. That blue-grey eyed doe birthed this self black kit which also has blue grey eyes.
Okay, so she's the broken. She also has white on the ears, and the dark nose is smaller than it should be. Himis should have dark feet, dark ears, and dark at the nose. The white feet are classic for brokens.
Yes, that's what happens when the chin gene is recessive to normal color, C c(chd). You can end up with unshowable bunnies with a chinchilla recessive, because the eye color is often messed with even though the chin is recessive (incompletely dominant). I once had a lovely black Satin Angora buck that was born with startling light blue eyes. I couldn't understand why, the doe was a chestnut agouti and the sire a red agouti. And I get a self black with blue eyes, no Vienna in the line? His siblings were a red and a white. Was I surprised when the white buck's eyes opened brown! Turns out there was chinchilla in the line, and the chinchilla caused the black's blue eyes, the sibling was an ermine. The black could be a Cc(chd) black, with the incomplete dominant thing going on, or a self chin c(chd)_--test breedings would tell.
I only mentioned Vienna because sometimes people get Dutch patterned brokens for no obvious reason, no broken parents involved. It often turns out that the line has had Vienna carriers (without mismarks) for a number of generations, and then out pops a white spotted baby. Below is a lilac tort that is Vienna marked (VM), you can see the white star, nose & chest, the feet were white as well.
In your case, the source of the broken has been found, it's the Himi doe.
Thank you everyone for your help. I went back out with a headlamp, to avoid the satin fiber reflecting colors from the environment, and sure enough, she really does have black tips. The fiber spun up as a rather dark gray, she's a chestnut agouti after all. Amazing how the satin fiber can reflect and change the appearance, like sunlight on water.
