Recessive Genes Galore!

Go ahead and groan. It's another post on genetics. Yes, it is the sad truth, but I'll try to make this one short and snappy.

A couple months ago I took in a family of gerbils who had been dumped at a pet shop. There were three pups plus the mom and dad. One pup was lilac, and the other two were black. Both of the parents were black, and it wasn't really any surprise that they happened to have the gene to make a red-eyed gerbil. I figured I might as well take them in, considering I've sold so many other gerbils in the past. Their colors weren't particularly neat or highly sought after, but I figured I might as well do it since they were free. Here are the genetic codes for the parents:

black - aaC-D-E-G-Pp <---I know the parents carry recessive 'p's because the lilac pup that came in the litter had red eyes.

lilac:

Nothing particularly exciting. Nothing very out of the ordinary.

If you don't want to end up with lots and lots of gerbils, you have to separate the female and male right before the female has a litter. Obviously, the male and female hadn't been separated, so she was due to have another litter. She had it. Six squirmy pups - four with black eyes, two with red eyes. I figured there were four blacks and two lilacs. Here is one of the black-eyed new-born pups:

At about five days, I started noticing that there seem to be a few different colors.

And then they started getting their peach fuzz:

They then started to look like gerbils at about ten days:

They finished getting their fur, and I could finally tell what colors they were:

nutmeg - aaC-D-ee-G-P-

black - aaC-D-E-G-P-

lilac - aaC-D-E-G-pp

sapphire - aaCc[chm]D-E-G-pp - sapphire is actually lighter than lilac, though it's hard to tell in this picture.

burmese - aac[chm]c[chm]D-E-P-

What the burmese will turn out to look like:

Maybe no one else gets all that excited about genetics, but I found it extremely fascinating to see that two black gerbils could produce all these colors - in one litter. Just knowing what their genes are, I know that they could have even more colors. Because of the colors of pups they had, I now know that both black parents have a lot of recessives:

aaCc[chm]D-Ee-G-Pp