agouti and chinchilla and REW

[Thekidd747]

So I had seen here that a chinchilla rabbit wont turn grey unless it also is Agouti. Does that also apply to REW? or is that totally.

From whay Ive read here I think REW rabbits can be agouti or not, and just want to confirm

 

[kusanar314]

REW is like dumping a bucket of white paint over the rabbit. It could be just about any color under there and unless you know it's family genetics, you won't have a clue.

 

[judymac]

So I had seen here that a chinchilla rabbit wont turn grey unless it also is Agouti.

Interesting question. Agouti is the gene that makes wild rabbit color, with more than one color on a hairshaft, generally a dark (black or chocolate based) color on the outside, then a band of a yellowish shade, and finally another dark band. For example, castor, aka chestnut agouti, has black tipping, with that chestnut brown on the outside band (a mix of gray tones with a little yellow to form chestnut), then a fawn/orange band, and then slate gray. The full color C- gene allows all of these colors to be expressed.

The chinchilla gene is recessive to full color C-, and the yellow pigment factories are shut down, which removes the yellow tones from the hairshaft, so the black tips stay, the outer coat becomes just gray without the yellow to form chestnut, the middle band has all the yellow removed, and it is just pearly white, and the base slate gray is unchanged.

With albino red (or ruby)-eyed-white rabbits, are even more recessive than full color C- or chinchilla, here, all of the pigment factories are closed, both for the yellow tones as well as the dark (chocolate, lilac, blue or black) shades. So, no matter what the genetics on the rabbit are for the other genes, they can't be printed onto the rabbit. The recessive albino gene shuts down all the pigment factories, like a printer being without ink--nothing gets printed, no matter what you programmed it to print, nothing gets onto the paper because the ink is shut off. That's why the idea of the white sheet came about, because with a REW, you have no idea what color is genetically programmed, because the ink was shut off. So, it could be a Vienna blue-eyed white, a broken, a harlequin/tricolor, a self black or blue or lilac, a tortoise shell, an orange agouti or castor. . .could be anything. . .but with the ink shut off, the pigment factories turned off, you just can't tell.

 

[Alaska Satin]

So I had seen here that a chinchilla rabbit wont turn grey unless it also is Agouti. Does that also apply to REW? or is that totally.

From whay Ive read here I think REW rabbits can be agouti or not, and just want to confirm

As @judymac points out above, the chinchilla gene suppresses the expression of yellow pigment. It is other genes that determine the coat pattern on the rabbit.

There are three options at the A locus, being agouti <A>, tan <at_> (aka otter), and self <aa>. A chinchilla rabbit needs the Agouti <A> to look like a chinchilla rabbit; otherwise it is a silver martin or a self chinchilla.
Here is a black chinchilla agouti:


If a rabbit with the chinchilla gene <cchd> also has a dominant tan gene <at_> instead of an agouti <A>, it becomes a silver martin, i.e. an otter with silvery-pearl where the tan markings would normally be.
Here is a blue silver marten:


If the rabbit is completely recessive self, <aa>, the self genes suppress the banding of an agouti and the markings of a tan and the rabbit is called a "self chin." It looks like a self black. Occasionally the blue-gray eyes of the chinchilla will show up on a black self chin, indicating that is what it is, but they can also have brown eyes, in which case you don't know unless you can tell from the pedigree or from test breeding whether it is a black or a self chin.
Here is a blue-eyed self chin bunny:


For rabbits carrying two dilute genes <dd>, a dilute chinchilla agouti is a blue chinchilla (aka squirrel), a blue otter becomes a blue silver martin (see photo above), and a blue self chin (aka self squirrel) looks like a solid blue rabbit. In that case, the eye color is completely unhelpful in identifying the chinchilla genetics.
Here is a self blue chin/self squirrel (the red in his eye is not real, it's a flash effect):


Another wrinkle is that if the rabbit also carries a steel gene <Es_> at the E locus, in addition to its agouti <A> and the chinchilla <cchd>, it becomes a silver-tipped steel.