Jake's Kindling Thread

[JakeM]

Thanks everyone. A quick update on the litter. Something odd but really cool has happened. Today I discovered that there is at least one blue kit in the litter! It's really cool because now it won't take me two generations to get more blues. You can actually see one in my first pic; there is a difference between a couple kits.

BUT, it's really odd because the father is a black out of a black buck and chocolate doe. To add to this, the black grandsire (who I know carries chocolate) is out of blacks and the chocolate doe is out of a black and chocolate. Black is very dominant in the pedigree to shorten things up. Now, there was ONE blue in the bucks background, about 4 generations back. So, this means that somehow, this blue's genes managed to get passed down through 4 generations to my buck. It's just really fascinating to me and really exciting.

If anyone is confused, let me know and I'll clarify.

 

[Hens and Roos]

That's awesome

 

[JakeM]

Another update, mostly just to rant about kits because they do 2 things that drive me insane.
1) Switching gender on me (sex them one day, a week later they've all swapped to the other one).

2) My rant is about their color. My blues, which I'm still convinced they're blue based on their skin color, are driving me insane. They have their fur in now, which apparently means they all get to look alike now-black.

I checked on them at 10 am on 11/1 (technically yesterday as it's 1 am as I'm typing this -night owl here) and their was defiantly a distinction still, made more obvious in direct sunlight (thank you south-facing windows). Well, I had our local rabbit club's meeting today, so I thought I'd snap a couple more pics to show a couple people. I went out to take the pictures, took the nest box out, got them under a light (sun was starting to set so no more direct sun), and pulled two out. With the naked eye, you could barely see a difference in color. I switched the pair a couple times cause I thought I kept pulling out two blues or the two blacks. Finally I found a pair with enough distinction that I could take a picture. Well, my camera (although is really nice and takes amazing quality pictures) took a picture that you couldn't even tell a difference in the two kits unless you looked at where their fur was shiny. Then, on top of that, the ones that were still in the nest box in the background, there was a difference that you could see. So maybe I did grab 2 blacks. I don't know. Last time I counted though, I had 4 blues and 2 blacks.

I love but hate this stage for kits (they're just so vulnerable and helpless, and tricksters). I can't wait for them to start hopping around, then at least their fur will be long enough to definitively tell which variety they are.

End Rant.

I'll post more pics within a couple days.

 

[Shorty]

I always count them wrong the first time. Even if I take them out and count them some how I miss one or have an extra they move so much the little stinkers

 

[promiseacres]

Fun figuring out sex, though by 10 to 14 d I can usually tell. As for color, the blues are "generally" easy to tell... at least mine are. But you never know. Hope you get your blues!

 

[Bunnylady]

Black is very dominant in the pedigree to shorten things up.

If anyone is confused, let me know and I'll clarify.

I'm sorry, Jake, but I'm afraid that you are the one who is confused - there is no such thing as "very dominant." In genetics, the term "dominant" just means that if the gene is present, you will see whatever it codes for; it has nothing to do with how often it appears in the gene pool or how likely it is to be inherited.

In the D-series, there are two possible genes - D (full color) and d (dilute). D shows complete dominance, meaning that you can't tell whether a rabbit has two copies of the dominant gene (DD) or one copy of the dominant and one of the recessive (Dd), because they look exactly the same. Dilute (d) is recessive; in a situation of complete dominance, the only way you will see the recessive is if the rabbit inherited the gene for it from both parents (dd).

Blue is the dilute version of Black. In order for a rabbit to be a Blue, it must inherit the gene for it (d) from both of its parents. If you breed two Blue rabbits together, you will never get Blacks, because the only genes of the D series that a Blue rabbit has are dilute genes (dd).

Just looking at a Black rabbit, you can't tell whether it is DD or Dd - they look exactly alike. The only way you can be sure that a Black rabbit has a dilute gene (d) is if it has a Blue parent, or it has Blue babies.

In a rabbit that is heterozygous (has one gene of two different types), each gene has an equal chance of getting inherited. If you are breeding a rabbit that is Dd, each offspring of that rabbit has a 50% chance of getting the D, and a 50% chance of getting the d. The odds are exactly like flipping a coin. But even though the chances of getting "heads" or "tails" is 50/50, there is no guarantee that you will get "heads" one time and "tails" the next. If you are breeding a heterozygote, though the odds of each gene getting passed along are 50/50, that doesn't mean that half of the offspring will inherit the one gene, and half the other. Who inherits which form is completely random; if you did the cross enough times to get thousands of offspring, the results would be close to half and half, but in a smaller sample group, you could see one gene pop up much more often than the other. It doesn't mean that the gene is "stronger," it's just dumb luck.

If I breed a homozygous Black (DD) to a Blue (dd), all of the offspring will be heterozygous Blacks (Dd); they will look exactly like homozygous Blacks. If I breed one of those heterozygous Blacks (Dd) to a homozygous Black (DD), some of the offspring will be DD, and some Dd, but I will have no idea which are which. If I breed one of these Blacks to anything and get even one Blue baby, I will know that the Black parent had to be Dd, because the only way for a baby to be Blue is if it inherited the dilute (d) from both of its parents. If I breed two Blacks together repeatedly and never get any Blue babies, I can't rule out the possibility that one parent or the other has a dilute gene, though if both parents had a dilute gene, it would be pretty unlikely to get dozens of offspring and none of them be Blues. Recessive genes can get passed along unseen for generations, until the rabbit gets bred to another rabbit with the same recessive gene and some babies inherit it from both parents.

(A long time ago, I bought a Netherland Dwarf rabbit that was some odd combination - Sable Point Marten, or something. Everything on its pedigree was a Chestnut. Obviously, a whole bunch of recessives were lurking in that gene pool, and all came together in this one rabbit!).

If you have a recessive color on the pedigree, there is some chance that the gene for it got inherited by your rabbit. The closer it is to your rabbit, the higher the likelihood, but you can't completely rule it out (unless you have something even more recessive between that rabbit and yours - a Chinchilla grandparent that fathered a REW parent, for example). If you don't have any offspring that are the recessive color, that doesn't necessarily mean that your rabbit doesn't have the recessive gene, it just means that you probably didn't happen to breed it to another rabbit that had the recessive gene.

Your Black buck had a Blue ancestor. It might impress you to think that the dilute gene has been lurking unseen for 4 generations before surfacing again, but if you knew that he had a Blue brother, and a Blue aunt, would you be equally impressed? Remember, the pedigree only shows the direct ancestors; it doesn't give you any information about the other relatives. It could be that the extended family tree of your buck is lousy with Blues, they just don't happen to be his direct ancestors.

But though Blue is a deeper shade of gray in the Havana than it is in most rabbits, it's still considerably lighter than Black. Your kits are what, 5 days old now? I'd think it would be easy to tell Blacks from Blues at this age.

 

[mikiz]

I think he means the ped is black heavy, not that it's more or less dominant than another gene.

 

[Bunnylady]

I think he means the ped is black heavy, not that it's more or less dominant than another gene.

Well, I can't say for Jake, but it's exactly what a lot of people seem to think. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say something like, "I bred this rabbit to this rabbit and the black must be really dominant in this line because almost everything I got from them was black." The way he phrased it sounded like he is making the same mistake, that of assuming that somehow the genes are battling to get inherited.

 

[mikiz]

Haha fair enough, at least the explanation is there now, good of you to sit and write it all out, you must get tired of explaining sometimes
I find it's really hard to get anything BUT black if you don't know what your genetics are, and even when you do 9 times out of 10 you'll work their combinations out to get black anyway!

I do find it hard to think that you wouldn't easily be able to tell blue from black when they have fur @JakeM the black/not black wouldn't be seal would it?

 

[JakeM]

@Bunnylady @mikiz

mikiz is correct, I did mean that the pedigree is black heavy. As a zoology student, I have a working knowledge of genetics and how they are passed, so I understand that genes can't be 'very dominant'. Thank you for the information though.
Also, I wasn't so much asking if others were confused because they don't know how genes work, but more so if they were confuse because of my wording. I don't always use the right term/phrase or there could be a better one than what I chose, but you learn and move on.


On to some great news, though!
Yesterday, around 5pm, I went out to check on the rabbits/give water to the mom again. Well, I checked on a mom who is due tomorrow and they had pulled fur! Granted it wasn't a lot, but fur is fur. So I naturally got super excited. Well, then I had to go to a meeting at 7, and that didn't finish until 9:30, so I didn't get home until 10... but I checked on the moms again and this time there were new babies!
These 6 little kits are out of Aida (chocolate) and Recluse (broken black who carries chocolate). I ended up with 3 broken black, 2 solid chocolate, and 1 solid black (Now hopefully no one changes colors on me).

Update on the black/blue litter: they are growing quickly, just as kits should along with sleeping almost all the time.