# Rex Tricolor and Chocolate



## AliceCheshireSmile (Mar 30, 2017)

Can chocolates carry tricolor? I bred my broken chocolate rex buck to a few does. Most recently a solid castor and an opal doe and ended up with tricolors, harlequins, (blues including all blue hued colors here) and broken blacks in both litters, not a single castor which surprised me.


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## promiseacres (Mar 31, 2017)

@Bunnylady ? Maybe you can answer? 
I know zero about tris.


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## HaloRabbits (Mar 31, 2017)

Chocolate and Harli are on different loci so yes the rabbit could carry the gene for harli (ej). If they also carry the gene for broken (like yours does) then yes you could get a tri colored.


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## Bunnylady (Mar 31, 2017)

Tri, of course, is a broken Harlequin. The gene for Harlequin is in the E series, whose "ladder of dominance" looks like this:

Es - Steel
E - normal extension (full color)
ej - harlequin
e - non-extension (tort, orange, red, etc)

(I will save everyone a headache by _not_ talking about Steel)

The other 3 genes in this series are pretty much normal in the way they interact; the most dominant one present in the rabbit is the one that gets expressed; particularly in self-patterned rabbits. Harlequin is a little odd; if an agouti-patterned rabbit inherits one copy of normal extension and one of harlequin (Eej) you may see a bit of bleed-through of harlequin patterning showing through the normal agouti coloring.





This is the belly of a castor Mini Rex buck. Markings like this are occasionally visible on the body, but they more often appear on the belly. I assume neither of the does look like this?

Obviously, you couldn't see this on a self-patterned rabbit, since the belly would be completely colored anyway. And you might not see it on a broken, if the dark harlequin markings didn't happen to be in a place where the rabbit was colored. I once had a Tri buck that I thought was a broken red when he was born. When he was almost full grown, I noticed three little black spots, just a few millimeters across, near one eye; those were the only places on the whole rabbit that weren't either red or white. 

So yes, a chocolate can carry harlequin unseen. Your litters are a perfect example of what I often tell people - "IME, the odds of you seeing a color in a litter are inversely proportional to your desire to see it. If there's one color/pattern that you are almost desperate to see, it's gonna be the last one to show up - maybe after several litters, when you've pretty much given up."


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