The chestnut/vm marked one I got pictures of too. As well as her twin (kinda but darker) If these are helpful to any imput on educated guesses?
and the black buns I'm attaching are from the same red buck, but different mom. Mom of the blacks was REW. since we're wondering if its silvering or steele, I was wondering if these what I thought were black actually have the silvering or steele as well? I had 4 blacks, out of the remaining I chose to show the black with the most white or silver hairs, and one with the least.
*Rabbit B is the one listed above in the origional post. A is the "twin"
Well, that's quite interesting. The bunny on the right is harder to judge, but it may have "stray white hairs," which are not always associated with steeling or silvering. However, the first black bunny, the one on the left in the photo of two, surely looks like a steel to me. You can pretty clearly see the light bands smooshed up toward the tips of the hairs:
If you pull out a "white" hair, it will probably look like this:
Silvering, on the other hand, produces entirely white hairs, and tends to turn the undercolor a bit paler/more silvery as well. Here are two photos of fur from a Champagne D'Argent (which is a self black rabbit with silvering), which by the way are full-color photos, not black and white images. These show the paler undercolor compared to a dark slate like a regular self black would be, while the apparently "white-tipped" hairs, when pulled out, are entirely white:
Okay, back to the original VM bunny, Rabbit B. It still looks like there might be harlequin at play, which has often confused me due to its unpredictable (to me) interaction with other genetic components. But it has a tendency to break up color patterns into groupings, and I see sharp delineations between colors on her, with clear areas of clean orange on her ears, vs patches of chestnut on her face, when none of these show up on her sister, which looks like a fairly typical chestnut.
Finally, the silvery orange bunny... The fact that it took so long for the white or white-tipped hairs to show up is surprising if she's a steel; usually you can tell within a few weeks of birth you've got a steel. Yet silvered rabbits usually don't silver all at once, the white tending to come in gradually in very interesting patterns like this:
The very restricted agouti markings on her head, her belly being generally dark when it would normally be creamy white all the way up the chest, the lack of creamy white footpads or creamy agouti markings on the inside of her hind feet, in both younger and older photos, all suggest steel to me. On the other hand, if she happened to get two copies of the wideband allele <
w> - and she certainly got at least one, from her red sire - that could produce similar effects.
But the real issue is that I don't think you could even
get an orange steel. Both alleles - the steel <
E(S)> and the non-extension <
e> which makes a chestnut into an orange - are on the same E locus. If you had a rabbit with <
E(S)e> it would be a steel, but to make orange you need
two copies of the completely recessive non-extension <
ee>. There's not enough room in the locus for both!
Any time I've ever thought there was "no way" something could happen genetically, often I'll find it happening fairly promptly afterward.
So the thing to do, as
@judymac mentioned, is to pull out some of the white/white-tipped hairs and look at them each singly. Be careful when pulling them as guard hairs tend to be extremely thin till about 2/3 the way up the hair, and they'll snap off pretty easily. If they have any banding at all, you've got a steel; if they are entirely white, it's silvering.
And eliminating the possibility of steel begs the question: how did silvering <
si>, which from what I've seen is partially dominant, hide in a red buck or a self black doe?
