Tort otters?

[BelleVie]

Hi everyone, I need some more help with colors... are these the tort otter "fox" color? Or fawn?

 

[Celice]

they look like smutty fawns to me

 

[Dood]

I agree - fawns

 

[BelleVie]

What's the possibility of amber? I just weighed and photographed them again today (one week since the other pictures) and all of the buns this color have darker tails...I saw a thread on here about amber vs red vs fawn that mentioned that ambers have dark tails as kits?

 

[Dood]

"Amber" are chocolate agouti and I am pretty sure your rabbits are fawn

What colour are the parents?

 

[alforddm]

What color where they born? If they were born pink then they are fawn, if they were born chocolate with agouti marks then they are amber.

I do agree with Dood though, they look fawn to me as well.

 

[BelleVie]

Sire is blue/fawn harlequin, dam is either the doe tri in my profile pic or my black/orange harlequin.

My problem is I didn't get to see them when they were first born because they were a surprise...

So this is what happened:

I started a colony outside last fall with a blue/fawn buck, a tri doe, a black/orange harli doe (supposedly...her blacks look a but blue to me), and a black otter doe. They were too young when I put them in together to have kits, so I figured that within a month or two they'd breed and there'd be kits on the way around Christmas. Well, it didn't happen, so I continued to wait.

At the end of February my buck came down with a bad inner ear infection with head tilt and didn't recover so I had to dispatch him. Still no kits. I thought that maybe the breeder sexed him wrong since I'd never even seen him mount the does. So I put kits out of mind. Then a month later I noticed my does had plugged their nest boxes up. I started to dig one out but it appeared to be just full of straw and poo...well I know it's stupid but I thought that maybe their boxes were dirty after a long winter and that was their way of telling me that they weren't up to their cleanliness standards...

So you can imagine my surprise when a couple of days later I was out feeding them and a little brown fur all zipped past my feet under one of their hideouts...and I've been trying to fill in the blanks ever since.

I have 20 kits in all, and after opening up the nest boxes there was only one dead kit found -- but as soon as the babes started moving they've been sharing boxes, so I've been trying to use the weights and colors to figure out which dam belongs to which kits. My black otter's babies were easy to figure out --except what color they were-- since I've seen her with them a lot and they're about a week bigger than the rest.

So between the other two does - the tri and harlequin- I need to figure out the most likely mother of these: 4 tri, 1 broken fawn (must be tri doe), 4 harlequin, and 5 fawns.

 

[alforddm]

Well, with that combination of parents amber is ruled out and unfortunately there is no way to know for sure which the doe the fawn and harlequins are from since tri is genetically harlequin with broken.

If the tri doe was actually a blue tri then all her babies from a blue fawn buck would be dilute. However, it can be very hard to tell if an animal is dilute on a fawn or lightly marked harlequin since blue affects black pigment to a greater extent than red/orange pigment. They may be lighter than the other fawns but that is still no guarantee and that is only if the doe is blue tri.

 

[BelleVie]

Well, with that combination of parents amber is ruled out and unfortunately there is no way to know for sure which the doe the fawn and harlequins are from since tri is genetically harlequin with broken.

If the tri doe was actually a blue tri then all her babies from a blue fawn buck would be dilute. However, it can be very hard to tell if an animal is dilute on a fawn or lightly marked harlequin since blue affects black pigment to a greater extent than red/orange pigment. They may be lighter than the other fawns but that is still no guarantee and that is only if the doe is blue tri.

That's kind of what I've been trying to figure out. My tri doe and harli doe are actually full sisters. They both look dilute to my eyes - especially when compared to examples of orange/black harlequins and tricolors. Also, according to their papers, all of the tricolors (except one blue/fawn further back from a different breeder) in their pedigrees are marked orange/black- and harlequins are just marked as 'harlequin' with no color notation...so I'm wondering if it's a case of the breeder didnt recognizing the difference? They do have a chocolate in there as well - and a white. (Which raises another question because there were two Charlie marked kits in the litter...?)

What do you think? Here are pics of a couple of the kits---

 

[Dood]

Those are all black based

 

[BelleVie]

Thanks dood, how can you tell? And how does dilute (fawn) play in if they are black based?

 

[Dood]

Their fur is black and not chocolate, blue or lilac

"Fawn" is not dilute but black based. "Cream" is the term used by most breeds to describe a blue based fawn

 

[BelleVie]

Ah ok -- so are the fawns A_B_C_ddee?

 

[Dood]

Your fawns are black based - A_ B_ C_ D_ ee

 

[BelleVie]

So that's orange technically, correct?

 

[alforddm]

Looking at the kits pictures, your tri doe can't be a blue tri because she produced black tri kits from your cream (blue fawn) buck. If she were blue tri, the tri kits would also have been blue tri and they are not.

Unfortunately that means there is no way to tell which kits are from which doe, with the exception of the tri kits being from the tri doe.

 

[Dood]

So that's orange technically, correct?

it is my understanding that "Orange" should have orange coloured bellies instead of white or cream.

To accomplish this they must have the wideband genes and be A_ B_ C_ D_ ee ww (reds also have red bellies and are wideband but more Rufus factors which darken the colour to red) <br /><br /> __________ Sun Apr 17, 2016 12:34 pm __________ <br /><br />

Looking at the kits pictures, your tri doe can't be a blue tri because she produced black tri kits from your cream (blue fawn) buck. If she were blue tri, the tri kits would also have been blue tri and they are not.

Unfortunately that means there is no way to tell which kits are from which doe, with the exception of the tri kits being from the tri doe.

Interesting :hmm:

BelleVie, could you please post pictures of your adult rabbits

 

[BelleVie]

Sure -- here they are...

 

[alforddm]

I don't see dilute (blue) in any of these rabbits to be honest.

 

[Dood]

Those 3 are all black based so it makes sense that the kits are all black based