# What's my color?



## micurious (Nov 7, 2015)

So I have these two litters. The first was born to an apparent merle - at/* B/* D/* C/* P/* insofar as I can tell - the second, born to a black self. The father is Pascal, below (who incidentally recently gave my cat a thrill when he escaped his cage, though he did survive to tell the tale.) Now, previous discussions were torn between Pascal being seal point beige, ie, ch/ce, vs ch/ch. The younger, lighter mouse at the top of the group photo is closer to Pascal's color. Pascal seems to have dark ruby eyes.

The litters are as follows: all appear to be tans (at), some are black, and some are this buttery beige color. The ones with the beige shade seem to have ruby eyes, as they had the lighter eye pigment when they were still pinkies, but are definitely not pink eyed. There is one merle who looks very like his mum, and there's another, born to the _black self_ who I am guessing is a roan. (Totally unanticipated development.)

My questions:

Are those medium brown mice in fact beige, and if so why the ruby eyes? I thought the whole point of black-eyed Siamese was that beige didn't dilute eye pigment?

Does this mean that Pascal is ch/ce or is it ch/something else?

Is that salt and pepper girl a roan? Is roan meant to be recessive and if not could the c dilutes on Pascal have masked it?

Thanks!!


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## Laigaie (Mar 7, 2011)

Beige is indeed a black-eyed color, which means that isn't beige. The other things that make mice that color include a very darkly shaded siamese (chch), argente, champagne, or something weird.

There should be zero need for discussion about Pascal's genetics. If he has black eyes, points, and and a generally beige-ish color, he is almost definitely colorpoint beige AKA black-eyed siamese (ce/ch). If he has red eyes, but is that color, he must be a very darkly shaded siamese. The weird thing he might be would be a very light burmese (cch/ch), possibly a chocolate burmese, which would also have black eyes. If he's got ruby eyes and is that color, he's a siamese. You don't get ruby eyes on ce/ch or cch/ch.

Moving on, tan is a dominant gene as well. If one of the mothers is a black self, and you haven't noticed a decidedly WHITE belly on Pascal, either those babies aren't at or they have a different parent. You didn't mention whether your merle is also tan, but again, one of the parents needs to have the gene for the pups to have the gene. Also, c-diluted pups will have white bellies with the at gene, just a reminder, making them fox.

Merle is the gene that typically causes roan mice. Roans are basically just merles that don't have patches. It is indeed recessive, but it's pretty visible on c-diluted mice (albeit very weird-looking!), so I'd guess both your black self and Pascal are carriers.


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## micurious (Nov 7, 2015)

Okay, so Pascal definitely isn't beige, and therefore neither are the babies. These c dilutes are really bugging me, because the c dilute babies are all notably darker than Pascal, save two, and I can't quite guess why. There's nothing cropping up in their siblings to suggest that there's a b or d allele floating around in my tiny gene pool.


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