Vehanks for that info, thats very helpful. I am hoping to havea good variety of showable rabbits, since I want to give 4h and ffa people in my area a better option of rabbits in the future. I was looking in his genetics and he has a lot of chestnuts and tortoiseshell in his background. If I were to get either of those colors as a doe would that mess up the otter? And if so, would I still at least get showable colors or would I expect a lot of unknowable ones?
In lops, a really wide range of colors is accepted so you won't really have too much trouble breeding any of the colors you mentioned together. Otters are newly accepted in the lops so you'll probably find that most otters have more of the "classic" colors in their pedigree. If you get a chestnut doe, look for one with selfs and/or otters in her background and you'll likely get the biggest variety of colors in the litter.
The colors I'd stay away from, at least at first, would be:
Steel (ticked group) - IMO a spectacular color in lops, French Lops in particular, but it does
NOT mix well with most other varieties. Getting a steel gene floating around in your otters or selfs can really mess things up. Getting
two steel genes can give you rabbits that look like selfs but aren't, which is even messier.
Sable (or Sable Chinchilla, Sable Point, etc.) - a color that is beautiful when paired with agouti but can mess with selfs and otters.
Silver/Silver Fox - yet another variety accepted in lops that does not play well with others.
One with a caveat: Chinchilla (agouti group)- it's accepted in lops, but mixed with otter it gives silver martin, and I'm not sure if that's accepted or not. (It may have been voted in with the otter, but I'm not sure; I've asked my Englop breeder friend but haven't heard back yet.)
Other than that, in your blue (dilute) otter buck carrying a possible non-extension gene (from the tortoiseshell), you could really get a rainbow of colors. And fortunately, lops accept a rainbow of colors!
If you're interested in the technicalities of the agoutis/otters/selfs, here's a quick summary:
The basic scheme of rabbit colors at the "A" locus (a locus is basically a stretch of DNA that codes for a particular characteristic) is pretty simple. There's agouti <A>, tan also known as otter, <at> and self <a>. This locus dictates the characteristic of where on the hair shaft certain colors will or won't appear.
Agoutis include the "banded" colors like chestnut, opal, chinchilla, lynx, and also less obvious ones like red, orange and fawn.
Tans include otters and silver martins.
Selfs are the solid colored rabbits like black, blue, chocolate and lilac, but they also include the color tortoiseshell (which, believe it or not, is actually a black rabbit with another gene that prevents the black from showing up on most of the rabbit).
Agouti is dominant, which means that's what you'll see on the rabbit even if it "carries" one of the other genes. Tan(otter) is recessive to agouti but dominant over self and self is recessive to both of the other two. Other than the issue of tweeners I mentioned in the previous post, you don't get a lot of interference when you breed the various A locus varieties together, as long as they're all accepted in the breed. (It's at other loci where you'll get that intereference, as mentioned above).
