This is the first time one of these projects has spanned more than a day or two.
I decided to experiment a little with this round, using
GenePoolz heavily to track traits of interest.
I figured it would be best to keep to a
white-coated dali for this, to have one less factor to focus on ... but it might be fun to try this again, chasing after coat color instead of eye color (I say this as though I didn't declare that I would never do this again after spending hours on this).
Full disclosure,
I'm well aware other people have done this, and done it better. I just wanted a bit of challenge this round since I got a leg-up by using a beautiful overwrite during the last round.
Anyway ...
BBB -
WW -
YY -
AAA - V
VZZ -
CCC -
XX Bows, for this round, mean that they
carry a different eye color than they show. For this round, I chose to concentrate on
carried genes as the deciding factor for which pups to keep.
Oh! And because I really wanted to make this round resemble a rigorous experiment, I bred
50 pups from each AC pair to get the above set. Then, I recorded any eye color or coat color variations ... and made graphics!
As you can see above, I got the full range of possible coat colors in the
400 generation two pups I bred. The percentage for carrying a color was very low (
less than 1%), with white still being the dominant coat color (and the desired coat color for the final pup of this round).
Eye colors had a wide variety as well (other than teal, which I put first because it's the 'original' color, the colors are listed in order of hex code value).
Teal (
6) was overwhelming dominate, which was to be expected. But I was excited to continue the project to see how quickly I could breed it out of this line ... so, it was on to the next generation.
CCCWW x
AAAYY x
XXZZ x
BBBVVSo, it turns out when you're breeding yourself 50 pups from each pair - no matter how early you get a nice variation, you get a lot of pretty pups to choose from. I was really, really pleased with this round. They all carried eye colors at least very similar to what they show in the picture above.
Again, I have a breakdown of the mutations for this round.
A couple fewer coat variations & overall fewer eye color variations. What was impressive with this round is
Teal (
6) had already dropped to being carried
genetically just
41% of the time. Other colors emerged as more common as well: 50 (6%), 52 (
5%), 132 (
12%), 172 (
6%), 174 (
7%), 176 (
5%), and 244 (
5%). Again, this is the 'carried' color in
GenePoolz, not the visible color on the pet.
Annnnnd ... on it goes to the next generation.
AAAYYxBBBVV -
CCCWxXXZZSo, this round seemed to go incredibly fast as I only had to breed 100 pups! CCCWxXXZZ is pretty much perfection, so I knew immediately that if that pup carried those eyes, that was the one moving forward (and, spoiler, BINGO!). AAAYYxBBBVV was lovely and spot-lacking - so definitely a stand-out as well.
Here's where the eye color chart becomes interesting. Teal (
6) has been
completely bred-out. Apparently, it doesn't take that long to breed-out a color if you're willing to put in some work. Black (
244), the greens, the blue/lilac, and the reds where the heaviest carried. The other colors were mostly singular mutations in the line.
Anyway, I had my two 4th generation pups ... so it was time to breed 50 last dalis to find my 5th generation star!
Let's look at the breakdown of mutations for the 5th generation pups first.
We're really starting to see a lot of consistency with the eyes in this generation.
Overwhelmingly, cherry (
50), green (
134), blue (
172), and black (
244) were dominant. I'm really loving the steel-blues (
110-119), so I think I might need to breed a pretty puppy in the future featuring eyes in that range. I also really loved the dark teal (
203).
Volos was, by far, the standout. Almost a clone of one his parents ... but with a black tail-tip. I've decided to go with an "Earth" naming theme for my white-coated dalmatian line.
Volos is apparently a Slavic Earth God; according to a site I randomly found (so no promises).
He poses like an absolute dream, so I'm excited to start showing this puppy.
Andddd ... we have the GenePoolz info for anyone who is curious.