What Color is This?

[Bunnylady]

Assuming that what you are working with are honest-to-goodness purebred New Zealands, with no funky surprises lurking, I see REW (Ruby-eyed White), possibly Chestnut, and Steel in the litter. Given that your buck is a Steel, and these are NZ's we are talking about, the solid black baby may be a "Super Steel." Steel is a weird gene. Steel is the most dominant allele in the E-series, but it can look different, depending on what it is paired with. Some combinations can give you a solid black (or brown, or blue, or lilac), or an animal with very light ticking. An animal with two copies of Steel (EsEs) will be solid black, just like a self patterned animal (aa) even if it has agouti (A) pattern genes. The black baby may stay solid black, or it may develop light ticking when it gets a bit older.

Do you have pedigrees on either of the parents?

 

[JT17]

Yes they are both supposed to be New Zealands. The REW doe I have is pedigreed and REW as far back as the breeder I got her from had records. The buck I dont have a pedigree but is supposed to be full NZ. But with him you can never be sure. Looking forward to seeing how these kits turn out.
I love my New Zealands. Many have mentioned a poor temperment sometimes but mine have been great. This kindle is her first litter and she has done absolutely awesome. I would like to start raising some purebred Silver Fox as well. I was considering Am Chins but the only breeder I can find near me will not respond so Im just gonna bide my time and see if I can eventually find a Silver Fox breeder near me.

 

[Tale of Tails Rabbitry]

I was going to say, it looks like one REW, 3 gold tipped steels (but I was teetering on that and I agree with @Bunnylady that they look like they could be chestnuts also, but then the sire is more golden for a GTS than we usually see too), and 2 solid blacks, although not absolutely sure on that one tucked under the other. One thing you can probably say with some certainty is that your REW doe is not carrying broken, because about half the kits would have had broken patterns if she did. All the ones with color are black based, which is good because it suggests less likelihood of funky stuff.

The GTSs will have the same genotype as the father: A_ B_ Cc D_ EsE ( GTS carrying white).
As already said, the blacks could be self blacks "aa E_" or agouti super steels "A_ EsEs or steels with non-extension "A_Ese" and both could be different. Steel makes for lots of unknowns in the genotype, so those two would be written just with what you do know: __ B_ Cc D_ __ (black carrying white)
The REW will still have mysterious unknowns: __ __ cc __ __ but based on what you see in this kindle I would suspect it is also black based and dense so I would write it as __ (B)_ cc (D)_ __

What you saw with this breeding, black, GTS (possibly chestnuts), REW, is probably about what you will always get breeding the same sire and dam although the ratios may differ.

As to Silver Foxes, most SF breeders in the southeast do not breed in the summer and summer growouts are culled for meat or being kept for show. If you are not in a big hurry on that, I might have an option for you. I will send you a private message to discuss it further.

 

[Bunnylady]

One thing you can probably say with some certainty is that your REW doe is not carrying broken, because about half the kits would have had broken patterns if she did.

Ehhh, you might be a bit premature with this. Let's put it this way: could you flip a coin, and get "heads" 5 times in a row? Of course you could! The odds of it happening aren't great (1 in 32), but it's possible. If you keep flipping the coin, and get nothing but "heads" as a result, at some point you should begin to suspect that it's a two-headed coin (homozygous), but a sample group of 5 is too small to be statistically significant.

When a parent has two different alleles at one locus (heterozygote), each kit has a one-out-of-two chance of inheriting one particular allele. That is true for each kit, completely independent of what the others in the litter got. You can definitely say that the doe isn't homozygous for Broken (since Broken is dominant, all of the colored kits would be visible Brokens if she was), but you can't rule out the possibility of her being heterozygous based just on one litter. The sample group is just too small.

Look at the number of REW's in this litter. The doe is homozygous (cc), so you know the kits have to get one copy of REW from her. There were two pink babies at birth; that's 2 out of 7 - more nearly 1/4 of the litter rather than half of it. Each baby had a 50/50 chance of getting the allele for Ruby-eyed White from the buck, and two of them did. If you could do this cross enough times to get 1000 offspring, about 500 would be REW's, but in a sample group as small as one litter, or even all of the babies one pair produce in their lifetimes, the results can be widely skewed from 50/50, and it would still be "normal."

he sire is more golden for a GTS than we usually see

When I look at this rabbit, what I see is a rabbit that has only partially molted, and which has a lot of staining/sunbleaching on the older hair that is still on him. The areas where the newer coat has grown in look like a pretty typical Steel color to me.

 

[Tale of Tails Rabbitry]

@Bunnylady, I agree that broken is not completely impossible or ruled out; I did write "some certainty," perhaps I should have written "seems less likely." When I had brokens in my cross breedings it usually averaged 50% of colored rabbits, but those kindles did not have REWs, so I get the point of the coin flip particularly with the REWs in the mix.

I also agree that it could be molt, but I have also seen uneveness in the steel with a more golden appearance that was not due to molting or staining. BUT you know I hate steel because I still get it wrong....

 

[Bunnylady]

Years ago, I had a REW Holland Lop doe that I bred to Smoke Pearl buck. In the first two litters from them, she had only REW's and Smoke Pearls, which made me suspect that she might be homozygous for dilute. In the third litter, there were two Broken Smoke Pearls, which made me wonder if I had bred her to a different buck until I remembered that her sire was a Broken Tort - clearly, she had inherited a Broken gene from him, even though I hadn't seen it until then. At some point, I got a couple of babies that I finally figured out were Blue Pearls; something for which I knew the genetics were there, but I just hadn't seen - but just in the one litter.

I had a Holland Lop doe that had a TV career; she wound up playing "Chester" on One Tree Hill (half sister to that REW doe, as a matter of fact). My glamour gal was a Broken Tort, and anyone who knows Hollands knows that Tort is an extremely common color. Since Cupcake was about 3 years old when she first got the role, I really wanted to breed another rabbit that could act as an "understudy" in the event that something unpleasant happened (unaltered females usually don't live all that long, unfortunately). I had the right genes all through my Holland herd to produce Broken Torts, but during the roughly 3 years that Cupcake had the role, not a single Broken Tort turned up in my nest boxes. Lots of other colors in solid and broken, but not the one that I needed.

"How can we drive her crazy today?"