- May 2, 2012
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I imagine there's some set of modifiers that determines just how a steel gets expressed, but I don't know what they are. As I said, I have a couple of solid black does that I know are Esej. All of the offspring of that particular pairing were born solid black, some developed a little bit of ticking as they grew older (looking almost like a Silver Fox), some remained pure black. Most of the rabbits that I believe to be Ese have looked like this:
Evidently, though, they can be solid colored like a self, as well.
If you are working with blue NZ's, this may be something else that may pop up to really drive you crazy:
As near as I can tell, this rabbit is a self chin - aacchd_(neither the rabbit nor the picture are mine). It had blues in its background. I remember a conversation a few years ago with a couple of people who were breeding blue NZ's; one was getting rabbits that were two distinctly different shades of blue, and was wondering which one was the "correct" shade. I have a feeling the lighter ones were blue self chins. Chin takes a little bit of the black pigment out, as well as the yellow/red, so it would make sense that the dilute would be a bit lighter than the dilute of a normal full-color black. Don't know why chin would be running around in NZ's, but apparently it is, at least in some lines of blues.
I imagine there's some set of modifiers that determines just how a steel gets expressed, but I don't know what they are. As I said, I have a couple of solid black does that I know are Esej. All of the offspring of that particular pairing were born solid black, some developed a little bit of ticking as they grew older (looking almost like a Silver Fox), some remained pure black. Most of the rabbits that I believe to be Ese have looked like this:
Evidently, though, they can be solid colored like a self, as well.
If you are working with blue NZ's, this may be something else that may pop up to really drive you crazy:
As near as I can tell, this rabbit is a self chin - aacchd_(neither the rabbit nor the picture are mine). It had blues in its background. I remember a conversation a few years ago with a couple of people who were breeding blue NZ's; one was getting rabbits that were two distinctly different shades of blue, and was wondering which one was the "correct" shade. I have a feeling the lighter ones were blue self chins. Chin takes a little bit of the black pigment out, as well as the yellow/red, so it would make sense that the dilute would be a bit lighter than the dilute of a normal full-color black. Don't know why chin would be running around in NZ's, but apparently it is, at least in some lines of blues.
I imagine there's some set of modifiers that determines just how a steel gets expressed, but I don't know what they are. As I said, I have a couple of solid black does that I know are Esej. All of the offspring of that particular pairing were born solid black, some developed a little bit of ticking as they grew older (looking almost like a Silver Fox), some remained pure black. Most of the rabbits that I believe to be Ese have looked like this:
Evidently, though, they can be solid colored like a self, as well.
If you are working with blue NZ's, this may be something else that may pop up to really drive you crazy:
As near as I can tell, this rabbit is a self chin - aacchd_(neither the rabbit nor the picture are mine). It had blues in its background. I remember a conversation a few years ago with a couple of people who were breeding blue NZ's; one was getting rabbits that were two distinctly different shades of blue, and was wondering which one was the "correct" shade. I have a feeling the lighter ones were blue self chins. Chin takes a little bit of the black pigment out, as well as the yellow/red, so it would make sense that the dilute would be a bit lighter than the dilute of a normal full-color black. Don't know why chin would be running around in NZ's, but apparently it is, at least in some lines of blues.
IWelcome to the forum!Glad you joined us.
Workin' on it, sour, workin' on it . . . .
As you know, a chestnut crossed to a red shouldn't be able to produce steel. In the E series, the gene for steel (Es) is dominant to both the E of the chestnut and the e of the red. If the chestnut had a steel gene, it would be steel, and Ese should be a black (or black with just a little bit of ticking), not a red. But there they are.
I'm going to assume that this isn't a case where the doe was bred by another buck besides the one the owner thinks sired the litter (that would be the easy answer, of course!).
So what I'm left with is, how could either a red or a chestnut actually be a steel?And the only possible wild card that I can think of is the wide-band gene.
Red NZ's have two copies of non-extension; that pushes the black on an agouti-patterned rabbit's hairs to just the tip of the hair. Wide band (w) acts in a similar manner, plus putting red/yellow pigment in places where it doesn't usually appear, like on the belly. With both non-extension and wide-band, you get all of the black off the body hairs, and (usually) a colored belly, which is how red NZ's almost look like self-colored animals.
Steel works in the opposite way; it allows the black to come further down from the tip of the hair, covering more of the lighter middle band. Steels often have darker bellies, etc, too.
I've had a little bit of experience with the steel gene, but I don't remember ever owning rabbits with wide-band. I can't help but wonder - what happens when steel and wide-band go head-to-head? Might a wide-band steel resemble a chestnut? I don't know.
The problem with this, of course, is that wide band is recessive; to see the results of wide band, the rabbit has to be homozygous for it. A red buck should be homozygous for wide band too, so all of the babies should be homozygous as well. A wide band chestnut is noticeably lighter than a normal chestnut, so it's possible to have agouti-patterned animals of two different shades, but the darker ones should still look like the doe, which has been called a chestnut. If the buck isn't a good, wide band red, I suppose that could account for it . . . . gotta say, it's intriguing.
Y'know, when I took genetics in college all those years ago, we joked that when Gregor Mendel was working out his theories with his peas and other plants, anything that didn't work out the way he thought it should went into the compost heap on the other side of the garden wall. I suspect this doe would be one he'd put over the garden wall (or in the stewpot, more likely). Problem solved!
