Rabbit mix with Angora and Lionhead, but looks like a Rex

[Campion and Dandelion]

Hi guys! I have a rabbit who is about 5 months old (I got him 3 months ago and I think he was around 2 months of age), who has a brother named Dandelion who looks just like an Angora with Lionhead (he is), but Campion, Dandelion's brother, looks like a Rex, yet his mother is an Angora and his father is a lionhead. Campion and Dandelion are about five pounds each. Campion has all of the traits of a Rex: the personality, the meaty body, soft and slick fur (like a chinchilla and not fluffy like Dandelion's), straight ears, ect. Why is Campion like this if both of his parents are fluffy breeds with really good tempers? Also, Campion is bigger than Dandelion has has the classic Rex neck folds. Do you think one of his parents had some Rex in them? Thanks so much for helping figure this out!

 

[Larsen Poultry Ranch]

Can you post some pictures of all the rabbits?

 

[Campion and Dandelion]

Of course! I can share some more recent photos of them when I use my phone in a couple minutes, but here are when they were younger. The first two are of Dandelion and the others are of Campion.

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[Larsen Poultry Ranch]

That looks like normal fur to me instead of Rex fur. Rex fur is caused by a double recessive "r" gene, so "rr"; normal fur (non-Rex) is either "RR" (normal fur) or "Rr" (normal fur but carries the Rex gene). Rex fur has the guard hairs the same length as the other hairs, and usually causes the whiskers to be shorter and curly. The fur looks (and feels) almost like velvet. This is one of my Rex does.

The Angora gene is in a different locus than the Rex gene, and I'm not as familiar with it as I don't have any Angoras yet, hopefully someday. But, I think that the Angora gene is similar to the Rex gene in that it's also a double recessive, so if you mixed it with a non-Angora, the resulting kits would not necessarily look Angora.

@Bunnylady is extremely knowledgeable about rabbits and might be able to explain more.

 

[Bunnylady]

The Rex coat is a recessive trait; for a rabbit to have the Rex coat, it must have inherited two copies of the gene for Rex, so both of its parents must have at least one gene for it. Angora is also a recessive trait; any rabbit that doesn't have two copies of the gene for Angora won't have an Angora coat. However, the Lionhead coat is a dominant trait; if a rabbit inherits just one copy of the mane gene, it will have a mane. The gene for the Rex coat happens in an entirely different place than the one for Angora, which happens in a different place from the one for Lionhead. Your typical Rex rabbit has Rex genes at the location for Rex, but normal genes at the location for Angora and Lionhead. An Angora rabbit has normal genes at the Rex location and Lionhead location, but Angora genes at the Angora location. A Lionhead rabbit has normal genes at the Rex and Angora locations, but at least one copy of the mane gene at that location.

Clear as mud?

What you said about the pictures is a little confusing, but the pictures you posted are of a rabbit with a normal (not Rex) coat, and one that appears to be kinda fuzzy all over; it's a little hard to tell whether or not he is maned. Your normal-coated rabbit (Campion) didn't get two copies of Angora ( he would have to get one copy from both his mother and his father to have an angora coat), nor did he get a mane gene from his father (who apparently had one copy for normal, and one for maned), so he has a normal coat. The one I'm not sure about is the fuzzy one - if all that fluff is mane, and he only has the one copy of the mane gene that he got from his dad (since his mother isn't a Lionhead, she obviously wouldn't have one to give), then he's what is known as a single-maned Lionhead. Single manes typically lose most of their manes as they mature, so Dandelion stands a good chance of looking a lot more like his brother as he ages. On the other hand, if he is truly fuzzy all over, then he has the Angora coat, which means his dad was carrying a gene for Angora.

 

[Niele da Kine]

Thanks, Bunnylady!

I'd always wondered about the Lionhead, Rex & angora coat type genes. So, Lionhead and angora are totally separate genes?! Frequently folks will breed the two together hoping for the long wool.

Where do you find this genetic rabbit information? We have English angoras here and I've been trying to figure out the genes for the face 'furnishings' of the English. I'm pretty sure it's a recessive since an English bred to a non-English angora will have the long wool but will lose the face furnishings. Although they don't seem to do it completely. I don't have a lot of hands on experience with hybrids, but from what little I've had, it's seemed that way. I'm seeing pure English having scant furnishings and not sure what that means genetically.

 

[messybun]

By any chance is the coat curly? I can’t tell from the pictures. I personally had a two pure lionheads produce a super fluff(super technical over here lol) who could have almost passed for an angora if he wanted to, and a sleek, astrex coat, both from the same litter. Astrex coats are my personal fascination, and my one remaining rabbit is the one who was born with it. It will be super soft and curly, sometimes the whiskers will even be curly. That might make sense why you have a fluff ball and a sleek baby? Are you sure of the heritage too?

 

[Niele da Kine]

I'm seeing the same sort of variation within an English angora x English angora cross. Some of the babies are 'extra fluffy' and I'm not quite sure why. Here's a picture of Buttercup, a normal 8 week old English angora. If anything, she's not got as much 'furnishings' on her ears as 'normal', but she's still within the parameters of 'normal'.

This is her littermate & brother, DaffyDill, again at eight weeks old.

He's being kept as a herd buck, although I'm still not sure how the 'extra fuzzy' shows up.

Here he is as an adult

He's pretty much 'extra fuzzy' over most of his coat, especially the face furnishings, although his ears are just 'normal fluffy'. He's ungroomed in the picture although he doesn't mat his coat very much. When he's combed he is one big fluff ball.

I'm thinking the long coat angora genes are possibly more than just one gene? Or one gene with modifiers for face and for ears?

 

[Bunnylady]

My understanding is that Angora is one gene, with lots of modifiers. I bred Jersey Woolies for many years, beginning shortly after they were first recognized by the ARBA. The ideal Wooly has about 3" of dense wool, with lots of guard hairs (French Angora-type coat), side trimmings and a wool cap on its face, and clean, normal furred ears. Those early Woolies were all over the road - barely making the minimum of 1 1/2 inch wool, thin wool, lacking guard hairs, lacking the wool cap/side trimmings, tufted ears . . . I even saw one with a Satin coat once. Getting all of the right features to show up consistently takes a lot of work.

 

[Niele da Kine]

Are there any sources for a list of the modifiers to an angora coat? In a perfect world, there'd be a list with rankings of which are dominant over the others?
There seems to be something for the different types of angora coat, you mentioned the French type with lots of guard hairs. The English type doesn't seem to have as many guard hairs and it seems to have softer undercoat. The Satin has the shiny gene, but that's on another location other than the 'll' (two small 'L's) of the long wool angora gene.

There seems to be a possible separate gene for fuzzy ears? One for face furnishings as well? Then, of course, the lionheads have a 'mane' gene. Any idea how many modifiers there could be?

I'm finding hybrid angoras to not be turning out like I expected. I'd expected if they were bred back to English each generation they'd be back to English again in a few generations but that doesn't seem to be happening. I'm working with a small gene pool and it's really difficult to get new quality stock to the island so in order to lower the level of inbreeding, several years ago a hybrid Satin/German buck was used with our English.

Satin/Germans have a different body style - sort of a cylinder instead of a dome. The first generation was pretty much as expected. No face furnishings or fluffy ears but the long wool. It wasn't as soft as English wool. The bodies were almost all the cylinder types. Second generation, still long cylinder bodies, still not as soft of wool although with scant face furnishings and at least tufted ears. Third generation, still longer cylinder body types, not the compact English, a bit more furnishings, the wool still isn't as soft and now it mats much more than the pure English.

I'm not sure if I should go another generation or not, it seems the more English they get the more matting they seem to want to do. At 15/16ths, though, it would seem they should be very English again, but they're still 'other' even when they've been bred back to pure English each succeeding generation.

I have a pair of 7/8ths albino siblings from an earlier hybrid litter, I could let them have a litter just to see what would happen. They're both good healthy rabbits, with almost silky wool, a bit of crimp, non-matting, fairly dense yet not crazy dense coats, fairly clean faces. They've got the longer cylindrical bodies and seem more 'other' than English. Albino to albino, they'd only have albino offspring, but I could use some more white fiber. I dunno, they're ten months old now, if they were gonna be bred, it should be soon but would they have better wool than a pure English? I'll shear the pair of them and see what their fiber looks like. If it's good fiber, then maybe they will be bred. They're very similar to each other (siblings and all) and any recessive genes/alleles they have should be able to pair up.

Although, it would be a litter more or less driven by curiosity to see what would show up than actually improving the fiber or breed so they probably won't be bred. Since the desperation of using the hybrid buck to lower inbreeding, I've gotten some offspring from one of our English does bred to an unpedigreed but most likely English buck. That has lowered the inbreeding levels to something reasonable without all the cylindrical bodies and harsher wool.