What color would you call this darker kit? I put it next to a chinchilla in for reference. There is also a more pure black/charcoal color not in these photos, so I think the darker chinchilla look may be chestnut? And perhaps the black looking rabbit could be steel?
Help me identify these colors, please!
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RabbitsOfTheCreek
Netherland Dwarf Breeder & Well-known Member
Just looks like a Steel to me
As far as I can tell you have gold-tipped steels and silver-tipped steels (which is a steel with the chinchilla gene as well) in those pictures. If they were chestnuts and chinchillas, they'd have white bellies. Steels can occasionally have white bellies too, but the agoutis don't have colored bellies.
Thanks. The ones I thought were chinchillas do have white bellies. Here are some pics of the chinchila looking kit and the kit that looks solid black.
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I'd agree with you about that being a chinchilla; although something about it seems a little different, I can't put my finger on it. However you'll know for sure when you can see rings (or not), but I've found that agouti ring color can develop quite slowly. Here's what a chinchilla looks like when its coat is more mature. This is close to ideal ring color - the rings yours have might not be as crisp:
The black kit looks like a black, but with all that steel, it could be a "supersteel" which has two steel genes and looks black; supersteels will sometimes, but not always, develop a little tipping on various areas of their bodies.
With chinchilla in the mix, if both parents carry self, it could be alternately be a self chinchilla, aka self chin, which also looks black, sometimes, but not always, with off-colored eyes (blue-gray, marbled or other).
Or it could be just a black.
Interesting. I can get a photo of the black kit's eyes tomorrow, and a better photo of the chinchilla fur, as well as the steel fur. I do know that the hinchilla also carries steel as well.I'd agree with you about that being a chinchilla; although something about it seems a little different, I can't put my finger on it. However you'll know for sure when you can see rings (or not), but I've found that agouti ring color can develop quite slowly. Here's what a chinchilla looks like when its coat is more mature. This is close to ideal ring color - the rings yours have might not be as crisp:
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The black kit looks like a black, but with all that steel, it could be a "supersteel" which has two steel genes and looks black; supersteels will sometimes, but not always, develop a little tipping on various areas of their bodies.
With chinchilla in the mix, if both parents carry self, it could be alternately be a self chinchilla, aka self chin, which also looks black, sometimes, but not always, with off-colored eyes (blue-gray, marbled or other).
Or it could be just a black.
Chinchilla can't theoretically "carry" steel. Steel is dominant and is expressed properly (looks like a classic steel) in combination with agouti; a genetic "steel chinchilla" is a silver-tipped steel.
To look like a gold-tipped steel (GTS), a rabbit needs agouti <A> and steel <Es> genes. Both of the genes are dominant at their loci, thus the rabbit only needs one copy of each to be a steel. A black GTS is <A_B_C_D_Es_>
A silver-tipped steel (STS) needs the above plus at least one copy of the gene for chinchilla <cchd> which acts to block expression of yellow pigment; the rabbit comes in shades of black/gray/white. A black STS is <A_B_cchd_D_Es_>
So, to get all these steels, only one of the parents needed to have the <Es> gene.
I can't remember what the parents are of the kits we're looking at, but if one is the chin, that narrows the black kit's possibilities to self black or self chin. Either of those would mean both parents must carry the gene for self, even if they aren't self themselves.
I need to reread this slowly while not wrestling small children to sleep.
The parents of these litters are either a REW/Californian/himi doe and a gts nz buck or a siamese sable doe and a chinchilla (flemish giant light grey) buck.
Here are the proud papas.
Here are the mamas.
This could account for the chinchilla looking "off", as chinchilla c(chd) combined with a more recessive option on the 'C' color gene can result in a more washed-out looking bunny. Sable c(chl), himi/Californian c(h), and albino/REW c would all qualify, and it looks like your stock carries all of these. For the best banding, you really want the kit to have double chinchilla, instead of one chinchilla and one of something more recessive with less color (like sable, himi or REW).
"Chinchilla can't theoretically "carry" steel. Steel is dominant and is expressed properly (looks like a classic steel) in combination with agouti; a genetic "steel chinchilla" is a silver-tipped steel .To look like a gold-tipped steel (GTS), a rabbit needs agouti <A> and steel <Es> genes. "--Alaska Satin
This is true, a rabbit with a more recessive allele cannot carry a more dominant one, no matter how many times it appears in the pedigree. But, steel has another sneaky secret. As Alaska Satin noted, steel needs agouti to express itself. If instead you have a kit that has inherited the recessive non-agouti trait, which we also call 'self', with no banding, no eye rings, no white belly--the steel will often not express itself, and again, you can have a black-looking rabbit. In this case, if mated to an agouti, its kits may inherit the steel (which is there but not expressed for lack of agouti), and the agouti from the other parent and produce steel kits. Which is how steel can hide for generations if always bred to non-agouti rabbits such as tortoiseshell, himi, black, blue, lilac or opal. REW can be either agouti or self, you can't tell because the albino option shuts off the pigment factory, leaving a plain white rabbit on the outside even though it can genetically be any color at all. In this scenario, with a rabbit with steel but not agouti, the rabbit isn't carrying steel, it IS steel, but because the steel option mainly affects the agouti pattern, you can't see it on non-agouti rabbits. One more way that a black rabbit may be more than just a plain black rabbit.
Thank you! This is fascinating and so complicated. I was told that the light greynflemish occasionally threw a steel or dark grey rabbit. This must be that recessive.
For next time, I have decided to breed a REW flemish to the Siamese sable doe, so w should see moe intesting colors, or perhaps more sables.
That's one of those theoretical rules that I've found doesn't always play out in real life. I've had numerous chinchilla Satins that carry ch, and a few that carried c, and they were nicely colored and banded. Actually a buck named Silverado, the best chin I've ever produced (in fact he had the best chinchilla banding I've ever seen in person), was <cchd ch> (CORRECTION: he's <cchd c>):
Thank you for the clarification. I meant, and should have written, that a phenotypic chinchilla can't carry steel.
Again, if it is a phenotypic chinchilla (phenotypic means it looks like a chinchilla), it can't carry steel; if it had the steel gene, it would look like a steel. If it has produced steel in the past, it is has provided the agouti allele to the kit, who gets the steel gene from its other parent, and together those genes combine to produce the steel appearance (GTS if the kit doesn't have the chin gene, STS if the kit does have and express the chin gene).
A phenotypic chinchilla needs two genes: agouti <A> and chinchilla <cchd>. (That's what your light grey rabbit has.)
A phenotypic steel needs two genes: agouti <A> and steel <Es>
A phenotypic STS has all three of those genes: agouti <A> and chinchilla <cchd> and steel <Es> (So, if your light grey actually had a steel gene, it would look like a STS.)
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Good to know. Most of my c(h) and c carriers do indeed have poorer banding. I wonder what the difference is? Some unknown polygenes that affect banding?
RabbitsOfTheCreek
Netherland Dwarf Breeder & Well-known Member
Are you sure they're not gray or blue-gray?
Blue eyes can come from BEW and Chinchilla genes
Of course, blue-grey. I have a bew buck for comparison. I dod see on thr kits that came with these does that some had white toes or a white nose or a white foot, so I wonder about the Vienna gene too, but I do not know how that works.
Would blue eyes on chinchilla or other colored rabbits be due to the Vienna gene? Or the chinchilla gene?
Chinchilla is famous for producing off-colored eyes. Most non-dilute colors require brown eyes, but rabbits with chinchilla as a recessive often show up with blue-gray to blue eyes. I would never have realized this black buck had chinchilla in his pedigree until I saw his eyes open:
I checked the pedigree, and sure enough there was the chinchilla. No BEW anywhere, nor any sign of mismarks on the line. It's just the chinchilla.
I checked the pedigree, and sure enough there was the chinchilla. No BEW anywhere, nor any sign of mismarks on the line. It's just the chinchilla.
It would not even take two copies of the chinchilla allele, just one paired with another allele that is recessive to chinchilla, plus the alleles for self <aa> The black kit is most likely what's called a self chinchilla or self chin. That means it's a chinchilla, except it has two self genes that prevent the agouti pattern from being expressed, since there are no agouti bands "allowed" on a self.
Frequently self chins will be born with blue-gray eyes, which often then turn brown as they age. That's important to know because once its eyes are brown, there's no way to know a rabbit is a self chin (unless it appears on the pedigree). Self chins can also be born with "marbled" eyes (part of the iris brown/part blue-gray); I have one of those out there right now, the son of a chinchilla buck that carries self (actually Silverado, the buck pictured in the fur photos above) and a self black doe.
I think the fact that some self chins are born with brown eyes and others with blue-gray eyes stems from the fact that chin can come with either color: according to the ARBA Standard of Perfection (SOP), in most breeds chinchilla colored rabbits can have either brown or blue-gray eyes.
This is a topic near and dear to my heart; for years I had back Satins that I bred for show, but struggled with blue-eyed kits in the blacks that were not showable. After 4-5 generations I outcrossed one of my blues to a New Zealand White (NZW), and ended up with an entire litter of chins! This meant that my "blue" Satin was actually a blue self chin (because I knew the NZW was <cc> so the allele for chin <cchd> could only have come from my buck). Way back on their lineage - so far back it no longer showed on the pedigree - was the broken chinchilla doe I had started with; since I had been breeding only selfs since then, I didn't know that chin allele had carried on in the background for years. Once I figured this out, I could quickly deal with those blue eyes in my blacks!
Now this is very interesting. At the same time I was struggling with blue-eyed black kits, I was having issues with white feet/white toenails, especially in my blacks. I have no reason to believe there was any vienna in the line. At the time I figured it was some sort of unidentified modifier and I just selected those rabbits out of my breeding program. But now that you mention it, I wonder if it had something to do with those self chins. The toenail problem disappeared about the time I got out of the self chin business!
But anyway, the BEW gene is kind of like REW in that it "whitewashes" a colored rabbit; however, unlike the REW allele it can change the color even if there's only one copy. (It's notated <v> for vienna, with the dominant non-vienna allele called <V>.) Two copies of it <vv> covers up whatever other colors the rabbit carries, and turns the eyes blue. One copy <Vv> will (sometimes) turn one or both eyes blue, or marbled, and will (sometimes) put white marks on a colored rabbit. If the <Vv> rabbit has white marks and/or blue or marbled eyes, it's called Vienna Marked (VM); if it is all colored with no marks or off-colored eyes, it's called a Vienna Carrier (VC). We've noticed in our Polish that some vienna lines produce VM kits so heavily-marked that they look almost like Dutch, some produce lightly-marked VM kits with a tiny star or nose spot, and other lines make VM kits with only a few white hairs. We haven't figured out what's going on with that yet.
The way to know whether your rabbits are carrying the vienna gene is to breed them with a BEW, which I think you have. If they are VMs, you will almost certainly get at least a few BEWs from the cross. (I say almost because there is little to nothing that is 100% sure in genetics!)
Another thing that might give your rabbits white feet and noses is the dutch gene. But that usually results in more white than the vienna, usually including areas around the shoulders.
Or it could be something I don't think anyone has named yet to explain the white marks on non-vienna, non-Dutch rabbits!
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I don't actually know... we can always resort to blaming those dodgy modifiers.
While I have not noticed an effect of the lower C series alleles, what has had the most pronounced effect on banding in my coppers and chins is the presence/absence of the wideband gene. Since I love reds and am always trying to get them back into my herd (long story), I mess around with that a lot. The wideband gene, even just one copy, seems to not only widen the middle band, but also occasionally to kind of mess up the banding pattern, making it more wavy or irregular than crisp. It doesn't seem to affect the color itself.
I'm curious about your ch and c carriers' poor banding. Is it the band definition or the color density that is affected, or both?
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