Genetics Question - Page 3

I thought that picture of the black/tan female with a litter of black puppies - hard to tell if they were really black - they could have been very dark black/tan (which is what they would be if the sire is black) - newborn puppies are very dark, sometimes hard to see the tan markings at first.

Statistics - it's all chance.  I  bred a solid black female to a dark sable (with black recessive) male - assuming most puppies would be sable - ALL puppies were black.  It's possible, obviously, for statistics to be wrong.  It's where the genes fall.

molly

 An easy way to think of the blk to blk breeding producing ONLY black puppies, is to remember the same issue with human eye color:  blue eye to blue eye will produce blue-eyed children, because if either parent had a gene for brown eyes, it would be expressed and the parent would have brown eyes, too.  Brown eyes can hide the fact that a parent is carrying a gene for a light eye (receissive), but the light eye gene can hide nothing.

Examples:

Brown eye to brown eye could produce blue eyes, if both parents carry the gene for blue eyes.  The blue simply is not expressed, because of the brown-eye gene.

Brown eye to blue eye  will produce all brown eyes, unless the brown-eyed parent is carrying a blue gene that pairs up to the other parent's.

Bottom line: if a dog 9 (or person) is expressing a recessive gene, it is because that is the ONLY gene for that trait that is carried.  Recessive genes cannot "hide" anything.

Before anyone starts screaming about comparing dogs to humans, I am fully aware that some traits  (hair texture, human skin color,  human epicanthic folds, dog  hips,  dog croups or upper arm length, etc.) are NOT that simple in either dogs or humans.  But, eye color in humans and the black recessive in gsds are just that simple.

Nia

Oh, and if anyone is "disturbed" that I agree with "someone" else on this very basic bit of gsds.....t

Just to clarify, I have a black sable bitch, both parents for her were black sable. In her litter they were all black exept her. If bred to a solid black will I get black sable?

Very possible,Medonte, but no guarantee. With genetics, you never know what the actual outcome will be until you try it and get the results. If so much black was in the litter that your girl came from, the chances of your girl being a black carrier I would think would be pretty high (both of her black sable parents have to be black gene carriers to produce it-which you say they did because most of the litter they had was black). I would say you would see your black sable if you had a big enough litter, but I'd also say you'd see some black, also. But there again, if you got an all-black litter from pairing up your black sable with a black, you shouldn't be surprised.

I've seen 2 pair-ups between black females and sable males (total unrelated breedings; one was done in Germany, one bred in Hungary and whelped here in the US). The results were thus(names given in case you'd wanna see pedigree background to see what's there color-wise):
* In one litter of 7 pups, 4 sables and 3 bi-colors.(V Quay vom Haus Purkner SchH3 KKL1A x Uhle vom Haus Magis )
* In the 2nd litter of 8 pups, 6 sable, 2 blacks.(V Arko vom Finsterengrund SchH2 x Viernheimi Courtney)

Genetics are awesome in that there is so many possibilities in some breedings. And I agree with Bob-O; everything used from the foundation of the breed is carried somewhere in the genetic make-up of each and every GSD, both good and bad. Whether it be colors, defects, coat length, longevity, drive, etc, there's all sorts  of things both positive and negative in the background of our marvelous breed.

Black to Black = black

kind of like White to White = White

There is simply not getting around it...unless there is dominant black in the GSD -- but I have never heard of it in this breed....if you get sables out of 2 blacks...a DNA test is probably a good idea.

Genetics are like oil and water...the water is recessive the dominant is oil....no matter if you pour the oil into a cup through the bottom...it always rises to the top...the water cant be on top of the oil....just like recessive genes cant make dominant genes.

http://homepage.usask.ca/~schmutz/agouti.html#black

Scroll down to the bottom of the page.

~Cate

Actually, after reading some of the comments here concerning what I've said, I've went back and rechecked on the info I was given. And amazingly enough, someone had interpreted the info wrong on the papers for color (and  someone had posted a wrong pic for the female's mom here on the database-TWO errors!). I didn't dig deeper into it myself at the time because I didn't think much about it. Breeding/pedigree info was right-just color of the dam given was wrong.
So, correction: the bi-color female I said had 2 black parents in fact had a SABLE mom (black sire is indeed correct). A black and sable CAN produce bi-color, which is what the female I was talking about  way earlier is. Sorry for confusion.  At least I can admit it and traced back to find where the discrepancy lay.