My little baby Mercury is a father! His present for his second birthday was his first co-ed sleep over with that hot red head Mara, and now she’s given birth to six beautiful and healthy border collie puppies.
Oh they grow up so fast, and the sight of his very first breath still plays vividly in stereo when I think of it. There’s an amazing amount of plot in those first eight weeks, a story unto itself and the first chapters of what’s starting to be a great read. It’s a different experience raising them from birth versus 8 weeks.
Each of my four dogs has a role, and a corner of my heart, and if I had to sum up Mercury’s part it’d be “Legacy.” A legacy is a gift you leave to others, the continuation of your work after you’re gone. But you have to build a legacy, and it has to start somewhere. Dublin and Celeste are that start, my choices from the pool of others’ art. Mercury is my art, the product of my breeding choices, and the start of my Border Collie legacy.
So it’s rather exciting to announce that Mercury is a father to 6 beautiful puppies. The joys of doggy fatherhood consist of making your “contribution” and then letting the mother do all the work, but we’re pretty proud none-the-less. Like human babies, there’s not a whole lot to talk about right now except which parent the pups resemble (apparently a sea otter mated with a mole-rat if looks are indicative of parentage at this age) and what color they are.
I haven’t had Mercury tested for color genetics, since it’s rather tangential to what I value in the dogs–I don’t breed for color–but it appears that Mercury carries his father’s tri-color allele (guaranteed given that it’s recessive and Dublin is homozygous) as well as the allele for the chocolate coat variant: a surprise.
Mara is rather a mystery as she’s a cryptic merle. Although there’s a separate dilution gene that turns black to blue and chocolate to lilac, the merle gene itself dilutes the coat as well, so black + merle = “blue” merle, even though we could very well call it black merle.
If black + merle = “blue merle,” what do we call blue + merle? I don’t know the term and suggest that instead of making up yet another word for even-more-diluted-than-blue, we just call black + merle “black merle” and blue + merle “blue merle.”
The best guess on Mara is cryptic merle lilac tricolor, but if we ignore her merle is she a chocolate/red or is she lilac (chocolate+dilute)? Since she’s cryptic, we only have a few dark spots to judge, but they look lilac, not chocolate. It’s also possible that there’s some sable element to her coat, giving even more complexity. But since all the dilute puppies are also cryptic merle, it’s likely that Mercury doesn’t carry dilute, as we don’t have any just lilac or just blue puppies: their dilution comes from the merle gene.
The happy group consists of 4 Boys, 2 Girls: 1 blue tricolor cryptic merle, 2 chocolates, 1 chocolate tricolor, and 2 red tricolor cryptic merles. The breeder calls the last two lilac cryptic merles, but I think the base color is chocolate, not lilac, and the extensive dilution of the merle makes their coats predominantly lighter-than-red.
The cryptic (not highly expressed) merle genes come from the mother, Mara, and are what dilute the black to slate in the blue merle tri, and the chocolate to “lilac” in the two lilac merle puppies. Since I don’t think Mercury carries Dilute, my guess is that whereas Mara is a Chocolate + Dilute + Merle, the two puppies are just Chocolate + Merle. If they are lilac + merle, then Mercury also carries Dilute.
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Anton
Christopher
Lawrence Dillard
Lech
Stephanie
Essere
Congrats!
Just because I’m a bit of a color genetics freak, merle isn’t a dilution. The color as seen on the dog is better understood as a gene that wants to blot out color fighting with a normal color gene. Where the normal color gene wins, you get the patches of base color (black or chocolate or whatever). Where they are battling it out, you get the mouse-grey (or, in your puppies, mouse-tan) that is actually a mixture of white and black and grey hairs (or white and chocolate and tan hairs).
There’s no real definition of “cryptic” merle; most breeds use it to indicate a dog who has so many base-color patches that the merleing is not evident except in small areas. You seem to be using it to mean that the dog has so many merled areas that the base color doesn’t show. In that case yes, those puppies are chocolate merle (brown merle, Aussies would call them red merle), not lilac merle.
If they were truly lilac the absolute darkest hair anywhere on their bodies would be isabella (or Weimaraner grey, if that helps you picture it). The dark patch shows that their base color is chocolate. And, I might add, if the bitch has any such dark patches, she’s not lilac either. She’s chocolate. (Which is what I would expect, looking at her; she does not look light enough or grey enough to be a true lilac/isabella merle.)
I agree that it’s ridiculous to call a black dog with merle markings a blue merle. Far too many breeds have the actual blue dilution and it confuses everybody.
The little dark puppy (the only one with black on him) doesn’t look like a blue (dilute) to me and he doesn’t look cryptic either. Unless the pictures are very deceiving, he’s a normal (black-based) merle with normal patching. If he were blue-based his darkest color would be a very definite blue, not black, and in my experience blues and lilacs (whether mixed or not with merle) are ALWAYS born with very pronounced eel striping, as shown beautifully by these Weim puppies:http://www.foxfireweim.com/dutch_hazel/images/newborn4.jpg.
Black and chocolate (and yellow and red, and merle of any of those) puppies are not born with the eel stripes; they may look a little wrinkly but you have to look hard for the variegation. Blues and lilacs are extreme.
In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter a bit, since you are absolutely correct that no good dog is a bad color. Just make sure that the few-spot merles are clearly registered as such so nobody unknowingly breeds them as non-merles.
.-= Joanna Kimball´s last blog ..Getting ready =-.
Joanna, thanks for the thorough comment!
* I think Mara is Chocolate + Dilute + Extensive Merle, meaning her base color is lilac and only a few small patches of it are evident. I think those patches are not chocolate, as they appear like dull lavender. From memory, her mother was Chocolate Tri, and her father was Blue Merle Tri.
Don’t let the flash + vivid setting on my camera fool you, when looking at her with the naked eye her coat can appear very very washed out. Same with the puppies. We were actually looking at the photos I took to get a clearer picture of the Chocolates and Black Merle puppy… the patterning was easier to see on the camera than with the naked eye.
* I don’t think Mercury carries Dilute. So that would mean Chocolate + Merle, and Black + Merle.
* I’ve read people say “merle isn’t a color, it’s a pattern” but the truth is that it’s a pattern of coloring, specifically a patterning of dilution. It isn’t just a rearranging of colored hairs that are already present, it is also a dilution of certain of those hairs. The interesting thing about Mara’s merle genes are the solid borders and the lack of “salt and pepper” mixing that we see in other variations.
* I suspect that we also have sable in effect, specifically the observation that individual hairs have one color at their tip and another at their root. Also, perhaps, an undercoat of a color/shade that is different than the top.
– My Dublin displays this sort of effect with his tri coloring. Much of his brown, especially on his cheeks is obscure because the black surrounding it has grown out. But also, on the very short hairs on his nose, you can see the brown when he’s in strong light and you brush the hairs with your fingers. Dublin’s brown in his tri is also extremely light.
* Mara’s breeder had her registered as a “cryptic” merle lilac tri, and her current owner uses this classification. What I take the cryptic classification to mean is very limited variance in the patterning. The fact that she is a merle isn’t very clear. So yes, this would apply to both very limited dilution, or very extensive dilution.
* Here’s another photo of the Tri Black Merle:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21665467@N04/4279839492/sizes/o/
It looks like his merle is expressed most clearly on one hind leg.
I’ve never pulled a hair off a dog, including solid (dominant) blacks, that wasn’t lighter at the root than the tip. I think the only ones that are absolutely saturated down to the root are the poodle-coated dogs. So that’s not a sign of sable, in my experience.
Sable is also VERY poorly used, colloquially. Sable is one of the most common colors in dogs; any fawn pug or fawn Dane or orange Pom or red Pembroke is a sable. And when herding dogs have color restricted to points, those are sable too. But for some reason breeders insist on using it to distinguish dogs with a very sooty overlay from dogs without that overlay. There’s no difference in the A series; the clearest orange and darkest sable are both sables. If the puppy is born with ANY dark hairs, it’s sable. True yellows (called reds or golds in some breeds, confusingly) never have a single black or chocolate hair on their bodies.
I know that lots of people talk about there being some difference between color and pattern and this and that and the other thing, but it’s not really valid. It’s not like the color genes are saying “OK, you’re a pattern, you sit over there; you’re a color, you sit over here.” They’re all called color genes and they all interact. The dilutions are specific genes that take a color and lighten its shade – maltese (works on the black and brown pigments) and cream (works on the red pigments). Chocolate isn’t a dilution of black and neither is merle, any more than a white spot is a dilution of the base color.
Maltese dilution makes hair look different because the melanin forms clumps and lumps instead of being evenly spread out. So it absorbs light differently and looks blue (or isabella/lilac). That makes it very different, structurally, than a simple color change because the dog expresses more eumelanin than pheomelanin. The cream dilution (which dilutes, for example, red poodles to white, and also seems to be responsible for white Shepherds and Samoyeds) is not yet well understood genetically but we know it’s there; I’ll be interested to see if it ends up being structural like the maltese dilution (I doubt it) or simply serially restricts phaomelanin expression.
.-= Joanna Kimball´s last blog ..Surgery tomorrow at 11 AM =-.
I really need to read up on the specifics/mechanics, I think that’ll make Merle more clear to me.
The observation that Tri and “Sable” are linked makes much more sense and answers a lot of questions.
P.S. Did you see the puppy from the Dublin X Mara litter? CRAZY coloring! Just look at how that Tri blends in on the face and the muted merle patterning.
http://www.border-wars.com/2008/11/dublins-love-children.html
Congratulations,
And the colors are amazing.
It’s interesting that sable and tricolor might be linked, because many red dachshunds are technically sables. Dachshunds also come in black and tan, which is just tricolor without white spotting.
.-= retrieverman´s last blog ..Polish deer =-.
It’s interesting that much of the underlying mechanisms of color genetics are still unknown or theory over settled science.
I found this site which goes on the theory that Tri Color and Sable are different alleles for the same gene locus and have incomplete dominance!
http://bowlingsite.mcf.com/GENETICS/ColorGen.html
BTW, I could tell that the mother was a different color from what I’ve normally seen in BC’s.
She almost looks like a mahogany Irish setter in some of your photos.
.-= retrieverman´s last blog ..Polish deer =-.
A dog that is blue and merle is called a slate merle. A merle dog with chocolate is called a cholcolate merle. And a dog that carries the merle and gold gene does not exhibit any sign of being merle.
Since blue is interchangeable with slate, you can see my point that the naming is not consistent. For one, I’ve never heard “black merle” which is a correct term in meaning. Instead, you hear “blue merle” meaning black + merle.
Likewise, red and chocolate are interchangeable, but they are both a base color, just like black. Black does not become chocolate through an additional gene, it’s an individual allele at the same locus that produces black.
So we get to pick:
{black, chocolate} {dilute, not dilute} {merle, not merle}
black + dilute = blue or slate
chocolate + dilute = lilac
So I suggest that the terms should be [black merle] [blue merle] [chocolate merle] [lilac merle]
You can replace red for chocolate or slate for blue, but NOT blue for black as is so often done in describing black merles as “blue merle.”
I agree that the names for border collie colors are problematic. Especially the colors blue and slate merle. I would change the names if I was king of the AKC.
None of your puppies even carry merle. Merle is a dominant gene and will not be hidden by a lilac or chocolate dog. And the puppies look lilac, chocolate, and black to me.
I want to explain my nomenclature. Chocolate is the color of your darker puppies and the AKC term for your chocolates is red. Lilacs are border collies who are exhibiting both blue and chocolate. Gold border collies cannot exhibit these colors at all. Gold is the AKC term for an orange or yellow border collie. In Australia this color is called red. It is all very confusing.
Only recessive genes can be “carried.” So of course none of the puppies carries Merle, a dominant gene.
The term Cryptic does not mean heterozygous recessive which is a genotype, it refers to the expression of the phenotype. I.e. The dog carries at least one copy of the Merle Gene (here, guaranteed to be one and only one), but the expression of the Merle is limited.
Mara is a cryptic merle because she doesn’t carry a profusion of white in her coat and the darkest patches are very small and few in number. She is not typical merle.
It is very possible that Mara has a unique mutation of the merle gene or perhaps a modifying gene that makes the expression so unusual.
If it’s not merle, we have to settle on a name for the effect. It’s not a simple dilution, because it’s not complete. On every dog that can be said to be dilute, there is at least one patch of clearly darker hairs. Both lilac puppies have at least one clear chocolate spot. The blue tri has black banding on his rear leg.
The darkest puppy isn’t black. If I held him up to any of the puppies from the Dublin x Celeste litter the difference in tone of his coat would be more clear. His coat is certainly light enough where the dark patches on his left rear leg are well defined and easy to spot.
I’ve never known a black dog to have such variegations. Sure, plenty of black BCs will display bleached out reddish hairs on their rear ends, but that’s environmental bleaching, not intrinsic color. Just look at how the chocolate puppy is MORE saturated than the blue tri.
I’m not certain if the blue and lilacs are accomplished due to the traditional dilution gene (meaning Mercury would have to be a carrier) or are diluted from the unique Merle gene (or another gene) from Mara (which would mean zero dilution contribution from Mercury).
I’ll post more photos that show the color progression as the pups age.
I don’t remember much about it but there is a border collie color called seal. I would bet that your off black puppy is actually seal.
As for merle I know mostly what I read on the internet about the gene. You may well be right that the merle is being expressed in an unusual way. I just don’t remember reading about it before.
If I learn more I will post it here.
I was rethinking the colors of some of the brown puppies. I think they are all just different variations of chocolate and that none of them are blue or lilac. The seal color of the off black puppy might be a hint to a different answer altogether.
http://www.bryningbordercollies.com/Border-Collie-Colours is the link that explains seal. Seal is a color that comes from the same gene as sable and is exhibited when a dog is laking a gene that enables the sable gene. I have never seen a border collie of these two colors.
You write: “1 blue tricolor cryptic merle, 2 chocolates, 1 chocolate tricolor, and 2 red tricolor cryptic merles.”
I think by blue you meant the one who is seal. If you read everything you can about seal you will realize that a puppy cannot be both seal and tri at the same time. Can you explain my misunderstanding? Because if your seal is indeed a tri color then my theory is proven wrong.
I’m pretty sure the puppy you’re talking about is Black + Tri + Merle. The Tri is 100%, so if that precludes Seal, then he’s not seal.
I don’t believe so many different options are linked to just one gene locus, and older research has made the mistake of assuming that certain options are just different alleles at one locus.
For instance, the “masking” modifier was not well appreciated until recently.
And I know there are more genes that we simply haven’t identified.
We’re still left with two puppies that have a small spot of chocolate surrounded by blonde. There is dilution here and some rather limited patterning. Call it merle or sable or piebald… but I don’t think what’s happening has a good name.
I now think Mara is a sable. Not exactly sure on the underlying color, but the tips and roots of her hairs, plus the undercoat resemble sable most. So does her son from the last litter… he looks Sable, although not a traditional color of sable.
I don’t know where this comes from as her mother was not sable (chocolate tri with random white spot) and her father was blue merle tri.
Your litters do seem hard to diagnose. Maybe the website I linked to is wrong in claiming that a dog cannot be seal and tri at the same time. And maybe some of the puppies in the litter along with the dam are sable.
The reason that i have been reading so much about border collie colors is because I have a gold dog with a liver colored nose. I have been trying to figure out if he is chocolate or not (or as the AKC calls it: red). I have been finding a lot of contradictory data online.
Yes, they are hard to figure out. I’m currently trying to see if my Dublin is masked sable instead of tri color, and I think Mara might be a sable merle. The recently discovered masking gene is similar to what you see with the eeRed you have, it may partially or fully cover up underlying colorations. I think Dublin has the masking,but Mara doesn’t, so she opens up the possibility to see some of the otherwise hidden phenotypes.
The mask covers up with black, the eeRed covers by bleaching.