Looks like blue chinchilla, but not..

PoppyLapine said:

I have a baby rabbit in a litter that looks like a broken blue chinchilla, but the inside of the ears are colored and so is around the eyes and nostrils. Is this a real coloring or something just messed up in its genetics. Sire is a broken blue otter and dam is a self blue.
Here's some pics of when it was a couple weeks old next to its broken blue sibling, its not super easy to see in pics, in person is better. It's a little bigger now, I can get more pics if wanted.

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Alaska Satin said:

Sounds like it could be steel, which is dominant but can hide in selfs since it needs an agout <A> or a tan <a(t)> to be expressed. Steel <E(S)> reduces the agouti markings - so dark ears and nostrils - but leaves banding on the tips of the hairs. Brokens make it harder since you can't look at belly color, and angora complicates things (for me) since the pattern is stretched out along the hair shaft. But a silver-tipped steel can look like a dark chinchilla there are still bands of color but they'll all be pushed up to the tips of the hairs.

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PoppyLapine said:

Ooo, than would be cool. Is there any way to confirm its steel? These are actually my english lops (is steel showable in them). I think I do remember seeing steel further back in one of my breeders pedigree. I'll have to look and see if I'm remembering right.

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Here's a few current close up pics, one of the ear and one the hair parted on the colored spot.

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Alaska Satin said:

I thought those ears looked long for such young bunnies! Yes, steel is showable in EngLops, in either gold or silver tipped, with a base color of black, blue, chocolate, lilac, sable or smoke pearl,

Like other agouti banding, steel takes time to show up in the coat as the fur grows in. My steels start out looking like selfs, then within a few days they look like agoutis (except for the dark ear linings and lack of nostril markings), having pretty distinct banding. But as the hair grows, the bands end up all pushed way up toward the tips, with a much wider area taken up by the undercolor.

Here is the development of gold-tipped steel in a Satin.
2-3 wks (sorry about poor photo quality, but hopefully you can still see the pattern):
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Same bunny at 4-5 wks:
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Close-up shots of gold-tipped steel guard hairs, in which you can see that the tips aren't actually gold, but having the gold band pushed toward the end of the shaft makes it appear so:

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Yes, that looks like steel to me with that huge amount of undercolor. But the way to really confirm it is to pull a single colored guard hair and lay it on either dark or light paper and look for the banding at the tip. If the hairs are all one color, something else is going on.

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PoppyLapine said:

Okay, i plucked some guard hairs and my camera refuses to focus, but I definitely see banding, it's no one color at the tip. And I'm right now looking at my pedigrees and her her great grandfather is a broken blue silver tipped steel, i didn't realize how close that steel was in her genetics, so it makes sense. So, I'd say it safe to say she's is indeed that! I'm going to keep her to grow out, so we'll see if anything crazy changes.

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