Color help on some babies please!

[RollingRivers86]

This agouti Holland Lop litter has me a bit bewildered as a newbie. The dad is Blue Tort and the Mom is a lilac chinchilla, at least on her pedigree. Please feel free to double-check her color as well. TIA!

Mom. She has a lighter belly and definitely has an agouti pattern. Lilac Chinchilla is correct, right? She has produced magpies with a harlequin before.
One of her babies. Is he a lightly marked fawn/lilac harlequin? He has this greyish splotch on his side but has a white belly and inner ears. Can harlequins have white bellies and ears?

Is this guy Opal? The end of his fur being white has me wondering if he is blue chinchilla or something?
Not sure about the girl on the right either. Blue chinchilla? I didn't think she was Opal because she doesn't have the lighter belly and inner ears.
Last baby looks just like mom so I assume Lilac Chinchilla.

 

[judymac]

There is some confusion about the chinchilla gene, and what it does. One of the main color genes is called the 'C' gene, short for 'color'. Full color is dominant, coded with a capital C, and includes most of the 'normal' colors, like chestnut agouti, orange, black, lilac, tortoiseshell. With full color, both the dark color pigment factories and yellowish/orange pigment are enabled.

Chinchilla is recessive to full color. In chinchilla, the dark colors (black and its dilute color blue, or chocolate and its dilute color lilac), still work just fine; but the yellow/orange pigment factory is shut down. All the rest of the genetics are the same as in the full-color rabbits, but change any yellowish tone to pearly white. Chestnut agouti becomes chinchilla, orange becomes ermine/frosty/frostie, black is still black because there was never any yellow in it, and tortoiseshell becomes pearl--the body is now pearl white, but the dark color on the points remains.

So, the normal chinchilla rabbit is genetically a chestnut agouti, with the yellowish tones removed. Chinchilla is an agouti, and has all the same agouti markings, the white eye rings, light belly, white inside the ear. The tan triangle behind the ears on the chestnut agouti becomes pearl white. When you see an agouti rabbit with white on that triangle, you know you have a chinchilla-based agouti color, not a full-color agouti pattern. Agoutis also have multiple colors on a single hairshaft in bands. For example, a chestnut agouti has a dab of black at the very tip of the hair, then the chestnut shade (which is black mixed with a bit of yellow), a middle yellow/orange band, and slate gray at the base.

With the chinchilla gene, chestnut agouti becomes black chinchilla, just called chinchilla; blue agouti (opal) becomes blue chinchilla, aka squirrel; chocolate agouti becomes chocolate chin; and lilac agouti (lynx) becomes lilac chinchilla.

Your doe has yellowish tones on her face, that would not be normal chinchilla coloration.

So, no, I don't think she's a chinchilla. It does look like there are yellow patches on her right (left in the photo) cheek, is that actually there, or just a reflection? If so, she carries the harlequin gene.

Chinchilla is an agouti, so you get the same agouti patterning,
including the bands of color. For example, the chestnut agouti has a dab of black at the very tip, then the chestnut shade (which is black pigment mixed in with a bit of yellow pigment), then the yellow/orange middle band, and slate gray at the base. Chinchilla does the same thing--the difference is, you take out any yellow shading. So, the bands are gray, pearly white, and more gray.

Harlequin takes that agouti banding, and instead of putting it in bands on a single hairshaft, it puts the bands of color in patches on the skin. The patches can be in a definite 'court jester' sort of pattern with alternating colors (a black ear opposite a black half of face, with the yellow ear opposite the yellow half of the face, etc.), or just in splotches, or narrow stripes/wide bands, to all mixed up together (called brindle). So, a harlequin does not typically display agouti patterning, it instead is busy putting splotches of color all over the body.

A black agouti (chestnut) rabbit will have black/orange patterning, a chocolate agouti chocolate with orange, a lilac agouti (lynx) rabbit lilac and fawn, and a blue agouti (opal) rabbit blue and fawn. If you add in the En dominant spotting gene, you end up with a tricolor--the two shades of harlequin plus white. Your rabbits have white markings on the face and toes, but that does not appear to be tricolor, it looks more like you have the Vienna blue-eyed-white recessive in your herd.

A bunny with two Vienna recessives will be albino white with blue eyes. A bunny with no Vienna recessive will be normal color. But a bunny with Vv one of each, is often Vienna-marked (VM for short), with that classic striping on the face, sometimes on the shoulder, and often white at the toes. The pattern used to be called 'Dutch-marked', because it resembled the Dutch rabbit breed patterning.

 

[judymac]

As to whether the next kit is opal or not: There are two clues here in this closeup of his eye. 1) I don't see an eye ring. Opals are a blue agouti, and would have an eye ring like any agouti. 2) Look at the shade of the eye. It is not the correct shade of grayish brown, but just looks gray. Gray is a classic sign of a chinchilla recessive.

While normal full color is dominant over chinchilla, it is incompletely dominant. That means that the chinchilla recessive can sneak in something to make its presence known, and that something is often a wrong-colored eye, usually gray or grayish blue.

The fact that you have had magpie kits shows that you do have the chinchilla gene in your herd, probably as a recessive. Since the chinchilla gene does not affect colors that only use the dark eumelanin pigments, you can't tell a black, blue, chocolate or lilac self chin from a full-color version. The gray eye says that chin is involved, but it could be as a recessive to full color, or as a self chin.

Vienna can also cause blue gray to blue eyes as a recessive, so that isn't conclusive. You can see the difference in eye color from your photo with the two kits side by side:

Chinchilla or Vienna as a recessive does not have to make its presence known, so lack of an eye color change does not mean the recessives aren't there.

I have trouble telling the hair colors apart on my computer monitor, so I'll leave it someone else to decide whether the colors are blue or lilac or something else. Just some tips here to help you decide between self/agouti and chin/full-color agouti.