Broken is a dominant trait. Since you bred to two broken bucks, it is no surprise you ended up with broken kits. Opal is an agouti color, and agouti is dominant over solid color, so dominant agouti and dominant broken makes for a good likelihood of broken agouti kits.
On the 'C' color gene, there are five possible options, in descending order of dominance. The big boss is full color, where both the dark (chocolate/black/blue/lilac) and yellowish (fawn/cream/orange/red) color pigment factories are fully stocked with pigment and fully operational. Not all full-color rabbits need both colors to be functional, like a black self colored rabbit that only has dark pigment, but the genetics for full-function are there with the dominant C gene.
Next down is chinchilla--here the dark color is still working fine, but the yellow shades are totally or mostly disabled. A full-color chestnut agouti with brown tips (black & yellow pigment combined), then a fawn band, then gray undercolor--becomes a chinchilla with the
c(chd) chinchilla dark gene. The rabbit would have pearl white everywhere the yellow couldn't develop, so it has a gray outer color, then pearl white and gray.
Your sable doe comes next. With the sable (also called chinchilla light, coded
c(chl)) the yellow still doesn't work, but the dark colors are getting muted some as well. What was black in full color, is now sepia brown, and the color lightens down the sides of the rabbit. Below that is the Californian/Himalayan/pointed white pattern (name depends on breed), where there is still no yellow, but the dark colors only show up on the cooler points, the main body is white and the eyes are red/pink. Albino is at the bottom of the list, the most recessive of all colors, where the pigment factories are just plain shut down, and no color appears on the rabbit, everything is just plain white.
So, my question is, what colors are you trying to achieve? If you want more sables, you will need to breed your sable doe to a buck that carries sable. Since that (or pointed white or albino if your doe has that as a recessive color behind the sable--each rabbit carries two copies of each gene, one from each parent) is what the mom could give to her offspring, you could breed her back to one of her bucks and hope for a sable kit.
If you are looking for orange/red/fawn, that could be an issue, as sable itself cannot produce that color, and it requires two recessive fawn genes (on the 'E' gene, fawn is recessive
ee) to get that color. So both parents must carry the recessive e gene and pass it on to their kits. Your sable doe could carry one recessive gene if she comes from red/orange lines, but cannot express it herself due to the sable blocking the yellow pigment issue. If she had two fawn genes, she wouldn't be a sable, she'd be a sable pearl, with pearl white everywhere the orange would have been. You would need to use a buck that is orange/red, or carries the gene from a parent to have a hope of orange/red kits, and then breed one of her does back to the orange buck.
If you are looking for chocolate, again, the kit will need recessive chocolate genes from both parents. Black (coded
B) is dominant over chocolate (coded with a small 'b' because it is the recessive choice), and you used a dominant black buck, and a opal buck, which is black plus the dilution gene. Sable is also black plus the sable gene. So, unless bucks and doe both carry a recessive chocolate gene, you are likely to get more black-based colors. Chocolate and lilac (which is chocolate plus a dilution gene), as well as chocolate agouti (sometimes called cinnamon) and lilac agouti (also called lynx) carry the chocolate gene, as does chocolate tortoiseshell, chocolate based orange, or chocolate sable. Chocolate chinchilla would also have the chocolate gene, but I'm told that chinchilla and sable don't always mix well, you could get funky colors that don't quite match the standards.
Opal has the recessive dilution gene (coded
dd), sable is the more dominant full dense color. If you mate one of the sable x opal kits back to the opal buck, you could get some of the dilute colors, like opal, lynx, lilac or blue.
You can get a variety of colors, but it depends on:
- What colors you are aiming for
- What recessive colors your stock may be carrying
- Which buck you choose to breed to
It may take a generation or two of breeding to combine the recessive traits your stock carries and produce a kit with the desired recessive traits. Don't give up, it just may not happen as quick as you'd like. The first step is to decide what colors you really want to achieve, and work from there towards that goal.
Or, imagine the sables posted above with white...
