Surprise red eyes... but how?

[user 7388]

So I have a doe who I bred for the first time recently. She's a chestnut. Her father was a purebred American Chinchilla. So she should be Ccchd.
I bred her to my ermine buck, his father was a NZW, so I know he carries c. But with my doe's parentage, I didn't expect any red eyes.

A_B_cchdcD_ee Enen (buck) x A_B_CcchdD_E_ (doe)

I had 9 bunnies. 1 chestnut, 1 broken chestnut, 1 broken chin, and 6 white bunnies, all presumed ermine. I suspected the doe was a carrier of ej, or e, so with the kits I guess that shows she's Ee.

But only four of the white bunnies are ermine. Two have red eyes! However, they aren't quite as red as you'd expect from an albino, they're kind of... dark red?

I've heard of partial red before but they shouldn't apply to these kits as far as I know. What's causing this, any thoughts?

EDIT: Nevermind I just reached out to the guy I got the doe from and he said his "purebred AmChin buck" has thrown REWs with a California cross doe. Welp. Guess the doe is Cc not Ccchd. Although that would mean 2/9 of the kits got C from the mom and 7/9 got c, which is pretty wild. Anyway, mods, you can delete this thread, I guess it's solved now.

 

[hotzcatz]

With gene percentages, it's not the overall number of kits in the litter which will have the characteristic shown by the genes. It's that each individual baby has that percentage of possibility of showing that characteristic. Small nuance, but seems to possibly explain the difference in quantity of a certain characteristic that you'd expect in a mating between two different buns.

__ __ Cc __ __ x __ __ cc __ __ you'd expect 50% of the litter to be REW. BUT, it's only that each kit has a 50% chance each time one is engendered of being REW. Which means it's possible, although not statistically likely, that the entire litter will be REW.

I've had entire litters be male or all female or all black even though both parents had tons of matching recessives. It's just in the roll of the dice. For each and every kit, not the litter as a whole.

 

[SableSteel]

There's some albino floating around in some chin gene pools. Some non-extension as well. Especially as some people likely crossed in new zealand whites or florida whites to improve type in some lines. Might be so far back you don't see it on the pedigree, but you see albinos pop up in a lot of those rarer commercial breeds.

 

[user 7388]

@hotcatz, yeah I know the probabilities are specific to each kit and not litters, but I guess I haven't seen a series of rolls of the dice quite this weighted before! Hopefully next time it weights the other way to make up for it, because I want full color kits, not albinos...

@SableSteel I figured someone bred in a NZW or something some time back, yeah. And I know breeding back out recessive alleles like that is a pain in the ass, but disappointing to know people are selling rabbits as purebred carrying off-type alleles.

 

[hotzcatz]

They may not have known about the off-type alleles? Depends on how far back their pedigree goes and how accurate folks were with the breeding.

Someone was showing me their tort x tort litter that was half blacks. They were absolutely certain those two torts were the parents although after a week of education, it was allowed that maybe their black buck had been "able to get to two does in one day". I guess they'd been figuring the tort buck was the sire since the black had already bred that day? Like that matters to a rabbit?

This particular person hasn't been keeping pedigrees, but I'm working on that with her. Even with a pedigree, though, with that kind of reasoning and lack of control of which buck's access to which doe, the pedigree won't have much value. GIGO works for pedigrees just as much as programming.

I've been trying to eradicate Vienna from my herd for several years now, although I'm stymied by lack of a large genetic pool to work with. By the time all the Vienna is out, the bunnies go from line bred to severely inbred. Healthy rabbits that may carry Vienna are better than unhealthy ones who don't. (Sigh!)