What color is Mara? Having had the pleasure of studding out both Mercury and Dublin to Mara, the 8 resulting puppies have created more questions than have been answered.
Mara’s breeder concluded that she was a Cryptic Merle Lilac Tricolor. This is a fair assessment given that she had one chocolate-ish spot, but was otherwise much lighter, much like two of the puppies in her current litter. I suspect that you can also add Sable. Here are some early photos of Mara which show how her coat has progressed from blonde to lilac at birth, 2 weeks and 6 weeks old:
That 6 weeks photo is pretty standard for Lilac, and you’ll notice that Mara’s nose is not black, not chocolate, but a purple color. I believe this suggests that the Chocolate to Lilac dilution gene is present.
Also notice how Mara’s tri brown markings are blended on her face instead of solid with more clear borders. This effect appears in both her father and her father’s mother, and I believe this suggests that her tri markings are actually Sable.
Mara’s sire is “Chip” and her dam is “Flynn.” Flynn is a smooth coat chocolate dog with white piebald markings on her back and ear. You’ll notice that the white completely obliterates both the chocolate and brown tri color around her mouth:
Given the extensive knock-0ut effect of Flynn’s white piebald markings, it’s hard to judge if her tri color brown has sable elements or not.
Mara’s sire, Chip, is a blue merle tricolor, although I contend that there’s evidence of sable blending in his cheeks and on his legs:
Chip’s sire appears to be an unremarkable black and white dog, but his mother, Roxie, has quite the palette of tan points, variegated red and chocolate and stray white spots. Although this picture isn’t the best, I think you can see the same blending in the tan markings in the cheeks:
Although I’m unsure if the cheek blending is a definitive indication of sable being present, Mara’s coat is very similar to the following unrelated dog that has been identified as a sable merle; if we replace the dominant Black with Brown and add the Dilution to Lilac, I’d say the patterning is strikingly similar:
The accompanying description of the coloring fits our situation well:
In some breeds, such as Shetland Sheepdogs and Rough Collies, a slightly different version of sable exists. This type consists of brownish hairs on the back and head (even though these dogs have black pigment), and is often called “shaded sable”. On this type of sable coat, merling can be quite visible (if there is a lot of dark brown shading) or very hard to see (if the shading is lighter and not so extensive). However, the merling is usually visible at birth, so breeders will generally know if their dogs are sable merles or just sables. A sable merle will have some faint, darker brown/tan patches on a lighter base, and the merling will usually be confined to the back and head. It is often most visible on the ears, where the fur is shorter.
As expected, Mara has the darkest hairs on her ears, head, and shoulder blades; the hairs along her trunk do show the sable effect with darker tips and lighter shafts, and her puppy photos show the darker brown/tan patches on a lighter base.
All in all, the original classification appears correct if we add in sable: Cryptic Sable Merle Lilac with tan points. Genetically this is Chocolate + Dilute + Sable + Merle.
* * *
Comments and disagreements are welcome, but be sure to read the Comment Policy. If this post made you think and you'd like to read more like it, consider a donation to my 4 Border Collies' Treat and Toy Fund. They'll be glad you did. You can subscribe to the feed or enter your e-mail in the field on the left to receive notice of new content. You can also like BorderWars on Facebook for more frequent musings and curiosities.
* * *
Anton
Christopher
Lawrence Dillard
Lech
Stephanie
Essere
I still think she’s way too dark to be a lilac merle; she looks like a chocolate merle to me for sure.
The sable discussion is actually unnecessary; of course their points are sable. Sable is the only way you get red/tan on a dog if the dog isn’t an ee yellow or red (like a Golden or an Irish setter). Every tricolor dog with tan points is genetically “sable” at those points.
What a lot of laypeople do is try to make a distinction between a clear unshaded tan with very few black hairs and a deeply shaded tan with lots of black or brown hairs. They’ll call the first one “fawn” or “red” or “tan,” and the second one “sable.” But the descriptions are misleading; genetically they’re talking about the exact same color.
The site you got the sable merle picture from is actually very good about this – note that they are clear that it’s all sable, and the only difference is the amount of black inclusions (which may be a modifier, but as of yet we don’t know it). So you can’t try to make a distinction between regular tan points and sable points; they’re the same thing.
Roxie, who is a cutie, is (I hesitate to say “just,” but it’s true) a garden-variety chocolate merle with (if I can see that properly) tan (meaning sable) points. The white inclusions on her back are either breaks in the blanket due to piebald spotting or are clear areas where the merle created white instead of light chocolate. Merle is a funny gene and as part of its spectrum of possible actions it can knock out the pigment entirely (creating a sort of “harlequin” border collie or corgi or whatever) or can put down big swaths of brownish pigment. If I had to guess, that’s what’s happening over Roxie’s shoulders. The gorgeous Ch. Giant Steps Front Page News (http://ivespotteddanes.com/BenoitWebPaige.html) had one cheek that was the brown/bronze color that merle sometimes creates.
I have a litter of Cardigans here, six tris with brindle points (very deep brindle, most of them, so they look black and white) and three merles. One of the merles has obviously tan (sable) points and the other two need to grow up a little bit more so I can tell whether they’re tan or brindle. But, as you would expect, the one with tan points had darker inclusions in the tan as a newborn, so the merle on top of that gave him a pattern like a red tabby cat within the tan. Now that he’s four weeks old the tan has lost its darker pigmenting and is just a normal peachy color.
The reason we can’t tell yet on the other two is precisely because all tan points are really sable points. As newborns the area where the points are was influenced by the normal sable darker shadings as well as by masking. As they grow, the shading will substantially clear and the masking (if present) will shrink. If they’re genetically brindle-pointed, the merle+brindle will keep their faces looking merle. If they’re tan (sable) – pointed, tan patches will appear.
Color genetics = fun but complicated!
.-= Joanna Kimball´s last blog ..Thirty days and the livin’ is easy =-.
I don’t have any experience with sable border collies but tri border collies were very consistent. They only had the tan markings in certain places.
When I read about sable border collies I see that the tan color can be found at every part of the border collie that isn’t white.
In pictures that are meant to explain border collie colors I have found that tri and sable are listed differently. For your cardigans they may be the same gene. But from reading about border collies the genes are suppose to be exclusive to each other. Perhaps the genes are sometimes exclusive and sometimes combined. That would mean that the border collie color genetics I have read contain fiction.
If we apply Occam’s Razor, that “plurality should not be posited without necessity,” I’m still pretty confident that Lilac should be the working theory. The nose and eye rims are not brown, they’re purple. Mara’s darkest spots are faded like an over ripe strawberry, not saturated. Her eyes are yellow, not amber or brown.
The Dilution gene necessary for lilac is also present in her lines. I talked with a breeder yesterday who confirmed that Roxie’s sire was lilac. She wasn’t as sure on the dam, so it’s not clear where that merle gene came from. But the Sire she was sure had produced straight blue and very light blue puppies.
If this is the same unusual expression of Merle, then that’s what it is. But jumping to a unique allele with unusual expression is accepting a more rare cause.
If the phenotype is difficult to call Brown, and we’re pretty sure that the genotype is unique, we’re rather unbound by convention, since convention doesn’t present sufficient options to accurately describe what we’re seeing and what the underlying genetics is.
While we could take this to the logical extreme and say if one hair is normal brown, there’s your answer. But then we have a trivial meaning of the phenotype. In the end, phenotype is really about what the dog LOOKS like, and it doesn’t look brown/liver/red. And it really is all about what we want to lump together into one phenotype, a subjective judgment call.
For instance, it’s entirely possible that a structurally different allele exists for red and chocolate, although we assume them to be just slightly different shades caused by the same allele. If the allele is different, making a different genotype, we could be honest in calling them different colors. If, however, the exact same allele will produce one dog that is visually red colored and another that is chocolate colored, and there isn’t another modifying gene, it makes more sense to keep one name despite the variety.
I wonder what would happen if you bred a reddish brown with a chocolate brown dog. Since we require both alleles at that locus to be “brown” to express brown, I imagine that we could establish which variety of brown is dominant to the other, or perhaps if they might be incomplete or even blend.
My point is that we shouldn’t demand simplification and grouping under the same name to a high degree (if one hair is brown, call it brown!) when we KNOW that genetically the issue is more complex than we currently model it.
I think your larger point is a good one. Being that since your litter does not seem to conform to conventional rules another gene which we don’t know about is probably at work.
As for chocolates blending with gold: that isn’t the case. The gold gene will mask the chocolate or blue fur. But the sable gene seems to blend with chocolate and gold. I don’t think your puppies have the gold gene though though they may well have a unique brown gene that I don’t know of.
Oh, sorry for the confusion. I didn’t mean any blending between the eeRed (looks golden blonde)… I was just saying, what if the different ends of the Liver color, one that looks reddish and the other which looks brownish, are actually different on the chemical level. Perhaps different enough to justify calling them different colors.
This has nothing to do with eeRed that actually hides underlying genetics because it obscures the coloring.
Again, I see no reason to call things the same when they are not the same. Specifically calling all tan points sable. Many Border Collies express tan markings that show no banding or dark tips that is the quintessential quality of sable.
The mere fact that one must distinguish a “clear” sable from a “shaded” sable, or perhaps even the saddle back sable shows that we have more mechanisms than names going on here.
The Agouti gene is a mess, or at least our understanding of it is. The fact that we have to designate so many of the options at the Agouti locus with sub classifications shows just how counter productive it is to assign too many powers to too few genes. In comparing two rather extensive analysis websites last time this came up, the more updated one concluded that certain qualities earlier attributed to the Agouti gene were actually governed at another locus. Even the older research left many of the questions as knowingly unanswered.
Since determining color in the absence of perfect genetic tests is a matter of usefulness, I think it’s clearly more exact and useful to call Mara a Sable Merle instead of a Tri Merle because Tri is most clearly understood as having finite brown markings at limited points on the coat and Sable is most clearly understood as having banding in large areas of the coat. Since we can observe that the sable is acting along her ears, head, and especially her trunk, a simple “Tri” designation does not express what we can see.
Here’s why I think the sable designation is necessary:
I think Mara is most certainly ayat, not atat. We don’t call atat sable at all in Border Collies, it’s called tricolor or tanpoint. To my knowledge the at allele does not create any banding or striping on the cheeks or anywhere else on the body.
I’m just following a link from elsewhere, but I enjoy discussing what I see when it comes to coat colors.
First of all, tan cheek patches on atat tan-pointed dogs are not unusual and can vary in size. Some, like this rottie, are almost nonexistent: http://www.dogfacts.org/Rottweiler-picture.jpg Other dogs, like this collie, have extensive tan on the cheek: http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/images14/collieLUKE012_11a.JPG Most likely, if Mara or her dam didn’t have such extensive white markings, you would observe black surrounding the tan cheek points like you just barely do on her sire.
But to muddy the waters a bit, I’ve met my share of sables who also had the same type of masking on their faces that a tri does. The main difference was the sables’ masks didn’t appear solid black like a tri’s does – they were grizzled like the rest of the sable dog. Often they appear to be patchy spectacles because of the variations in banding on each hair.
My guess is you have a kk atat dog here rather than a kk ayat, mainly because her darker coloration is smooth, rather than grizzled with tan. Looking at a bb sable might help illustrate what I’m saying: http://www.specialtyshepherds.com/images/dogs/cedar02.JPG There is nothing solid about this dog’s coat coloration because he’s sable, not tan pointed.
Anyway, best wishes and luck with your beautiful border collie. 🙂
Anybody can see she’s brown and white, sheesh 😉 In a past life I had a short stint breeding Siamese cats, there were only 4 color options, I loved it 😀
.-= Ms. X´s last blog ..BAT Behaviour Adjustment Training =-.
At the end of the day it really isn’t that important that a breeder understand these genetics unless the breeder is messing with merle. Or coarse that is the case here. This complication makes me not want to breed with merles. Brindle and Sable are the colors that I don’t have but would find interesting. Gold, chocolate, blue, and black are the colors that I have and would be happy to keep.
Yes, there’s nothing really critical going on here. It’s just fun and a nice diversion from the more serious topics one could talk about.
It’s also a good primer for genetics given that we can SEE the results. I’d even argue that the visual aspects of genetics is what drew our attention and focus and has advanced the science as far as it has come.
We even create visual markers (by splicing in phosphorescent genes from sea creatures, etc) where none exist naturally to further the science.
Regarding the health issues surrounding Merles… I think the current theories suggest that it’s not just linked but that the process of dilution itself causes issues much like Albinism can cause issues.
In the eyes, the paucity or lack of pigment prevents effective electromagnetic response to stimulus. I.e. not enough light spectrum is absorbed in bleached receptors to register enough charge for the brain to process.
In the ears, I think it deals with the nature of the hairs themselves. They are either too brittle or too thin or don’t respond in the expected manner.
This seems consistent with the observation that dogs with color around the eyes are much less likely to have issues, even in the double merle. I don’t know where color must be present to effect the inner-ear, but likewise, most dogs with full coloring on the head or surrounding the vital tissues do not experience the problems.
Double merles who are all or mostly white are known to not even correctly develop eyes at all.
That is some very interesting information about merles.
You’re sort of in the right world but not exactly.
Merle does cause issues because of its physical effects (in other words, they are not inherited or inheritable, but wholly the result of the physical action of the color genes) but there is not a perfect explanation for why. Merle is not a well-studied gene (yet) and we’ll know more in the next ten years.
You should never assume that a dog with lots of color on its head is “safe” or a white-headed dog is not. If that were the case, half the Old English Sheepdogs in the world would be deaf! Same thing with double merles; MANY have color on the head and around the eyes and ears and are affected; many merles and piebalds have little or no color and are fine. Looking at pigment around ears or eyes is something we breeders do and have desperate hopes (or despairs) about, when we’re worried about a puppy, but it’s extremely unreliable. BAER testing is a must.
Ditto with microophthalmia, which is the eye development issue you’re talking about. Some (thankfully very few) double merles are affected by it or by coloboma or some of the other eye issues, most are not, but it’s not linked to more or less white around the eyes.
Oh, and Mara is definitely a tri (atat), NOT a sable (ayat or ayay). Both her parents were atat, which means she must be the same.
.-= Joanna Kimball´s last blog ..First bath =-.
Whatever she really is… she looks a lot like an Irish patterned sable English shepherd (like mine). So much so that our rescue group would gladly take her in and… if she passed a working evaluation our registry would accept her offspring when bred with a registered English Shepherd.
English shepherds look a lot like border collies if you don’t worry too much about the white on most borders. Or am I wrong? I didn’t realize that english shepherds come in more than one color.
Roxie’s markings remind me of the semi-controversial color called harlequin merle in Aussies. See http://www.ashgi.org/color/harlequin_aussies.htm for more pictures and a discussion.
I’d guess kk ayat M (merle), dd (dilute “blue”), probable EM (Mask), bb (liver) see the Aussie on the left in in this article http://homepage.usask.ca/~schmutz/dilutions.html
She doesn’t quite show the typical bb + dd that one sees in Dobermans, but it’s likely she carries for the dilutes. I think there are times when a heterozygote who should show the dominant color shows at least some of the recessive characteristics as well – I suppose if one had the money, you could do a DNA check thru one of the various centers that do that.
I think the Aussie on the left is a match for her tri-color son, Zappa. See him in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r0GHpmKMnY … check out 3:30-3:36. Morgan is ruffling his haunch hair and we were talking about how he shows a pronounced white undercoat like his mother. The other chocolates do not, their hairs are dark chocolate all the way down to skin. The black-tri (there is some dilute going on the black here too, my guess is from the merle or sable, not the traditional dilution gene) has this effect too.
In this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoXbUmXB2O8 you can see just how much lighter Mara and two of the puppies are compared to the chocolates.
I have a pup whose colour I’m trying to identify. She is a brown and white border collie, but her nose is black and she has black trim on her face and black highlights on her back (with brown freckles on her snout) – absolutely beautiful! Her siblings were black and white, as was mom and dad – she is a fluke.
Is there any way I could post her photos to get input from the others who watch this site?