# Tricolour support



## icedmice

I've finally taken the leap to breed my girl.
She is the first example of the tri phenotype recorded in Australia to my knowledge.

If it is a true tri, I'm glad we found it so early in the development of our fancy as it will be a variety that is not far behind our "show type" mice which are equivalent to your "pet type" mice but slightly more robust than a typical pet store mouse.
See my article http://sites.google.com/site/icedmicerodentry/for-sale/why-buy-iced-mice-and-rats, this is how far we've come in the last decade.
The doe pictured in my article is grandmother to this litter.

Yes I'm confient she is a tri it just doesn't show well on the photos because of the flash.

This is the pairing I chose, the male is very young, he best *>siamese<* colouring is yet to be seen:









Pregnant Shirley Temple:









Shirley babies:








They are all black eyed so I assume mum is coffee tri. It's most likely a poor example of coffee, we don't have to many of those either.

photo better illustrating Shirley's tri colour:


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## Jack Garcia

I'm very interested to see how the babies develop.

Australia is sort of an anomaly in terms of the mouse fancy due to the strict laws on import and export. I'd love to visit one of your shows to experience the way things are done out there!

If she's the same sort of dominant splashed (Sp/*) mouse we have in the US and Europe, half the babies should be splashed or tri(color). Keep us updated with pictures!


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## icedmice

Are you serious!!!

I understood the tri gene to be recessive so all the babies would be carriers.

I'm so exited. I hope she is a tri then!
I'll certainly be specialising in the variety if that's the case.

If not I'll keep playing around with this lot to see if I am able to reproduce the trait in the F2 or F3 generations.


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## Jack Garcia

Yep, I'm serious. Tricolors like we in the US have are genetically c-dilute recessives which are not PEW (so, that means himalayan, siamese, beige, stone, chinchilla, burmese, and so forth) who are also splashed (Spl/*) and which then also have some sort of white spotting. To get tricolor mice, you're combining both dominant and recessive traits on the same mouse.

When all three "ingredients" occur on the same mouse, it results in animals with three distinct colors.

When Splashed and the C-dilutes occur but not white spotting, the mice are splashed.

However, yours may be a new mutation so even if there are no F1 tricolors, it can't hurt to back-cross to be sure.


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## Rhasputin

She almost looks like a dutch mouse! 

It's also possible that she could be broken merle? Although I don't know of any merles with black spots and coffee spots . . .


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## Jack Garcia

Merle doesn't produce differently-colored animals in mice. It produces mice with different shades of the same color. So for example, patches of light blue on dark blue, or black on gray and so forth.


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## Rhasputin

Yeah. I dunno, I figured maybe the colours could be a bit off in the photo. 
If she is a tri, and you really are one of the few, if not the only person with a tri mouse in Aussie, then your mice will be really in-demand!


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## icedmice

That's so awesome!

When I first brought her home I knew she was unique.

My first reaction was merle, which is why she was called Shirley. Reading more on the subject she doesn't resemble merles from international lines.
Our manx are recessive so it isn't unreasonable to assume our tri phenotype mice are different as well.

Shirley is currently 7 months old, this is her first litter. I'm not sure it's possible to backcross, she might be a bit old. 
I'll try brother to sister matings, it should give me a similar result.


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## moustress

Excuse me, but I think you misspoke, Jack. Merle doesn't make different shades of the same color. It has patches of any standardized color mixed with patches of 'roan' with hairs of full strength mixed with white hairs. Marked roan has both of these kind of patches along with patches of white.

Roan and merle are still mysterious and unpredictable to breeders as to how it is produced.


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## WNTMousery

Merle gives the illusion of a dark shade and a light shade of the same color. The light shade being the color interspersed with white hairs.


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## Jack Garcia

Very little in Mendelian inheritance is "mysterious and unpredictable" unless you believe bananas grow in grocery stores, as mentioned before.

It is technically true that merle is a roan mouse with patches of solid color, but when you evenly mix white (such as you see on a roan) with black, you get gray. With merle mice, think of paint. When you evenly mix white with dark blue, you get light blue, and so forth.

To the original poster: seven months is a bit old for a first litter, but in the case of an otherwise healthy mouse who may be a spontaneous mutation you're wishing to reproduce, I wouldn't hesitate to breed her again. I have a friend who breed a mouse after a year old. She slowly culled down the litter until there were only 2 or 3 babies, and all was well.


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## moustress

The white hairs give the undiluted color the appearance but not the reality of being lighter.


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## Rhasputin

I've heard of something called a 'sport' marking. Is it possible that this is one of those? Since I only see one spot of the other colour on the mouse.


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## Jack Garcia

moustress said:


> The white hairs give the undiluted color the appearance but not the reality of being lighter.


When you're dealing with color theory, appearance is reality. Put a green apple on a green wall, then on a red wall and tell me which looks brighter. 

The colors around (or inside) other colors greatly affect the way the human eye perceives the whole.


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## windyhill

I have a few pictures that may help.
Blue Merle doe:








Its blue on blue

Black Merle Buck


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## nuedaimice

> When you're dealing with color theory, appearance is reality.


So if I came on here and started calling all of my mice "brown" and "grey" and "orange", no one would care or dare to correct me, right?

I tend to agree with moustress on this point. Just because there is a difference, and anyone else would be corrected if they used the wrong terminology. A merle dog does not have patches of roan, it actually is grey and black. A merle mouse is more akin to a varnish roan horse. And having a merle dog to compare to a merle mouse on a daily basis, I would describe a black "merle" mouse as a black roan with solid black patches.

And in reference to this case, where you would be comparing this black and "beige" mouse, notating the white hairs interspersed in the lighter "shade" would be very helpful in the identification process.


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## Jack Garcia

No, not really. You're missing a key difference. In beige, blue, or red or other self mice, all of the hairs are (in proper specimens) the same color. In merle mice, the hairs are different colors and interspersed in such a way to create the appearance of one color on the background of another color. Make sense? The way that the black and white combine to "make" gray on a merle mouse is unique to merle (and roan). I do understand what you're saying, and agree with part of it, except that merle (and roan) is a bit different from most other (self) colors in mice.


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## icedmice

LOL...love the thoughful debates that go on here. We don't have roan or merle in Australia so it's fascinating to read people's opinions. We have some members that frequent Finnmouse, AFRMA and fun mouse but you get so much more out of the fanciers that work with and understand these varieties.

UPDATE: HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE!!!
They are 3 days old and all have dark skin much like a black or agouti AND they appear SELF!!!
The father I'm confident would at least carry recessive white spotting, his mother has a small white headspot and had 3 marked pups.

This is puzzling....but exciting!

I'm hesitant to say what it is till their fur starts growing in but I have some hypothesis of what it might be if they are indeed black self.
I'll come up with a new plan once I have a better idea of their true colour.


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## Jack Garcia

Sometimes, even though chance tells us what "should" happen in terms of what percentage of babies should be what color/marking, Mother Nature decides otherwise.

For example, even though statistically every litter should be 50% male and 50% female, we've all had experiences where this isn't the case. But on a larger scale, over years and decades and hundreds and thousands of litters, it proves to be accurate.

If dad is S/s and mom is s/s, it's possible, just not very likely, that all of the babies are S/s.

I'm very much looking forward to pictures, regardless as to how they turn out!


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## icedmice

Yeah but assuming she is a tri Spl/* then then should the babies appear to have markings but actually be splashed not tri???


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## Jack Garcia

They should appear that way, yes. But again, you're in 'uncharted waters' so to speak, being so far (geographically) removed from the rest of the world's tricolor/splashed mice, so I guess only time well tell.


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## nuedaimice

Out of curiosity, I went back and reread and I am not seeing this, but what was the sire to this litter? I assumed it was the siamese (that is a siamese, yes?) in the first picture, but it never actually says? Perhaps this information could offer some insight into your results?


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## icedmice

He is as he appears, a siamese.


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## icedmice

I should add Jim Beam is not a regular siamese he is a siamese fox, so some of the babies might turn out tan. I couldn't help that because he was the only siamese I had available to stud.

updated photo of the litter:









I'm still puzzled by the lack of spots even if she isn't a tri by your standards.

The paler coloured ones might be chocolate based. 
The sire's father was a chocolate carrier and there were chocolate marked mice in the tub where I bought the "tri" doe, they possibly were siblings.

I'm hoping I can recover the tri phenotype in the F2 or F3 generations.


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## Rhasputin

Did everyone miss my comment asking if it's possible that it's a 'sport'?


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## WNTMousery

I think nobody understood what you meant by "sport." hehe

I was thinking she might be a Chimera.


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## Rhasputin

I read about them somewhere, but now I can't seem to find info on them.

I vaguely understand them to be a semi-randomly occuring spot of a different colour, that isn't inheritable?
It might have something to do with chimeras.


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## icedmice

WOW ... don't you have a better chance of winning lottery than getting a chimera mouse?

Just have to wait and see what happens in the next few generations.


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## Jack Garcia

I don't know...because mice have so many babies, chimeras would be more common. Also, if the chimera took place on a mouse whose cells were a/a and whose chimeric cells were a/a (for example), you'd never know because they'd be the same color.


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## moustress

Tricolors have extra genetic material added and are more properly called 'mosaic' than 'chimera'.


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## icedmice

I understand what Jack is saying.

Chimeras aren't tris genetically speaking, although may appear to be tri's on the surface. Chimeras are like a siamese twin that never seperated and developed as a single living organism.
In other words it's like having two mice for the price of one. 
If both mice are the same colour an extrodinary miracle of nature such as this could easily go unnoticed.

In theory if Shirley is a chimera some of the mice in this litter could actually be half siblings! 
It's incredible to think it's possible!!!

A tri is also referred to as a transgenic mouse (or mosaic), it is caused by an anomoly where the mouse has extra genetic material which permitts the expression of two (splashed) or three (tri) colours.


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## WNTMousery

lol

Yes, icedmice, you got what I was saying. Not that ALL tricolor mice are chimeras, just that this girl would seem to be a chimera RATHER than a tricolor (genotypically speaking; phenotypically speaking she is indeed tricolor in the basic sense of the word).


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## moustress

With only extra material from an 'X' chromosome, there's no full chimera, only half of a shell identity is whatever part of the DNA it's inserted into. It's the shell of that 'X' that occasionally results in ambiguous sexual development.


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## WNTMousery

Lounie, can you put what you're trying to say into the correct terms? I don't understand what you're talking about.


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## moustress

It's called trisomy; in this case it's only partial trisomy. That means it has three sets of genes instead of the usual two that give male XY and female XX, so you get some that are XXY. In some cases the creature may show male sexual characteristics and female characteristics at the same time, or switch from one to the other.


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## icedmice

I highly doubt it's a trisomy of any sort.

I've never heard of it causing variation in colour other than what it should be naturally. I know a fair bit about trisomy disorders because my brother has trisomy 21 aka Down Syndrome.
Very few if any animals with trisomy conditions survive because they are either unable to develop normally or are sterile which is certainly not the case for Shirley.

Just an update this is what they look like now, all black or black tan with minor spotting in various places. Tans are present because the father is a siamese fox, he has a tan gene that wasn't unexpected.


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## Autumn2005

No tris? Sorry for that. But I do see one with a kiss on its hip!


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## WillowDragon

Do they have white on thier bellies? They look like berkshire with the white feet and tail tips!


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## Rhasputin

Here's some information that another member gave me about the 'sport' markings I was talking about:

"You are thinking of what is called a "somatic mutation" which would be more likely than a chimera, thats for sure.

http://www.ashgi.org/color/Aussie_somat ... tions.html

Somatic mutations can occur in many animals.

http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/glossary=somaticmutation "


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## windyhill

Aww, they are cute! I want a black tan


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## icedmice

Yes willow it does fit the description of a poorly marked berkshire. I'm also not surprised to find these in the litter because the sire's father was a headspot doe who produced two mice of hereford appearance.


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