What color is this? Is it actually just black?

[jaxmarblebuns]

This is dahlia, her mom is pure bred Californian and her dad is a pure bred rex, black and orange tri (not sure of his background.) Her litter included two cal marked, one cal marked but in a broke pattern, one broke black, and her which i thought was pure black.

She is 8 weeks old, so coming up in her first molt. In the past two or three weeks I noticed that around her neck was getting silvery/white ticking and the last few days I noticed that it is starting to go down her sides. I though of how Champagne De argents color change and though maybe something like that was happening. I’m not sure if these two breed could produce something like that though.

So my question is, do you think she is just going to molt into bad coloring? Or, do you think she’s not actually black?

The pictures do not show it very well, I tried but lighting is terrible here. The third pick is an exaggeration of how it looks.

(You can skip this part) I’m asking this for a couple reasons.
1. I’m bad at genetics and want to know more+I’m very curious.
2. I entered her in meat class for fair as a black (because she was when I entered her) but if she has white on a usable portion of the pelt she will be DQ’d, so I may need to know I different color to enter her under

 

[Jackrabbit]

It looks black…… the last picture is pretty terrible cuz of the lighting. Maybe get a few better pics of her body.

 

[jaxmarblebuns]

It looks black…… the last picture is pretty terrible cuz of the lighting. Maybe get a few better pics of her body.

I tried to but I only have an iPhone 5c to use for a camera atm so it kind sucks/is glary no matter what. I’ll tri in a couple days though.

 

[Alaska Satin]

That doesn't look like a black; blacks can have some/many "scattered white hairs" but they're not usually arranged the way they are on your bunny. But it's not really an identifiable color/pattern yet either. It's so hard to say what's behind colors like REW and himi/cal, or even self black to some degree. They can cover up so many other genes. It's when you breed them with another color that all sorts of unexpected things can crop up.

I've found that lots of NZ whites are actually chestnut, chinchilla or steel "underneath" the white. That steel <Es> is a tricky thing (or maybe more than one thing), and so is the gene for silvering <si>. Hard to say for sure from the photos, but it looks like your bunny has white hairs rather than white-tipped hairs. So, <si> is the one I'm wondering about for your "black" rabbit.

The silvering gene is supposed to be recessive, but it's one of the least understood and might involve more than one gene, or be strongly affected by modifiers, or both. I know that in some cases it is partially dominant, meaning that it can show up in a reduced form in animals that carry only one copy of it; in others it is completely recessive, having no expression at all in an animal that is heterozyous, i.e. <Sisi>. I crossed a purebred Californian into my purebred Satin line some years ago to improve my Satins' growth rates. In the first generation I got "blacks" that had so much silvering that I actually showed them successfully as Silvers (while they were juniors). I never did the breeding experiment that would have shown for sure they carried <si> - I wanted to get rid of the white hairs in my Satins, not produce more white hairs - but I kind of wish I had.

The champagnes and silver fox I've watched grow have differed pretty dramatically from individual to individual in their development of silvering, and those are animals that are homozygous for silver <sisi>. I'd say that if you continue to see an increase white hairs as she grows, that would suggest there's a stealth silver gene in there (probably coming from the cal dam).

If it was me entering her in the fair, since she's a mixed breed, I'd enter her as a silver rather than a black. I could see her being DQ'd for excessive white hairs in a black, while in a silvered rabbit the silvering shows up, as I said, sequentially, and juniors are not expected to be fully silvered, so she may be given the benefit of the doubt. And with luck, between now and the fair she'll develop even more silvering to make the pelt more attractive (for meat and fur purposes).

Here's one of my "silver" juniors at about 10 weeks; she continued to develop more white hairs as she grew, though she never got any silvering on her head.

 

[jaxmarblebuns]

Here are some better clips:

 

[Alaska Satin]

Well, it looks a lot more like steel from those images. All you can say for (reasonably) sure is she's not a black!

 

[Alaska Satin]

I did a little more poking around and found/remembered that if you have an agouti rabbit with both a steel gene <Es> and a non-extension gene <e> it ends up looking like a black rabbit, or a black with some small amount of ticking.
So here're my thoughts: Your cal doe is either <E_> or <_E>. Californians are selfs, and though the steel gene is dominant over <E>, it can only show up in an agouti, so she could be <Es E> i.e. a steel but you'd never know it.
Your tricolor buck would be <ej_> and <ej> is dominant to <e> so he could be <ej e>.
So I'm wondering if Dahlia got <Es> from the cal and <e> from the tri (plus an agouti gene <A> from the tri, as many/most correct harlequins/tris are agouti-based). And <A_ B_ C_ D_ Es e> = black , or black with some ticking!

 

[judymac]

I think the real problem is the tri. Tri is a broken harlequin e(j). One of the side effects of having steel with a recessive harlequin allele E(S) e(j), is that the recessive harlequin can cause the ticking to only occur where the dark patches would have been in a harlequin pattern. The steel still makes the rabbit dark, but the harlequin keeps acting in the background as if the pattern was still there. Looks crazy, but it has a logical reason behind it.