Fun-Tricky bicolor images. - Page 5

Ella does not have toe penciling (only sparce black hairs, I dont know if that counts), but her heal is a mixed black and tan about 50:50.  She also has faint tan behind the ear.  But her face is completely black except for the over the eye tan patch and cheek to neck tan.  Her tan legs come up to her armpits in the front and groin in the back, but does not extend to her chest or belly.  The other thing is, she has gotten darker since she was a puppy.

Below is her sister, Debby.  Mom is sable carrying black; dad is bicolor or black and tan and carries black.  I have a hard time calling Debby anything but bi color.  Which would make Ella bi color.
 

Elkoor, does Apache's sable markings "hide" his bi color markings?  I've noticed sable color seems to mask bi color, but sable with black and tan are both expressed, ie codominant.

 mfh27 those dogs are very interesting! Look at the pasterns on the dog on the table!

mfh, if you mean by that the tar heels and pencil toeing, then yes, he carries those markings. But so would also a dark sable that would carry black, like Tunguska. I only knew because of that one bi-color pup, and that Apache is the one who has bi-colored ancestry. Tunguska has pretty much all sable ancestry.

The girl I still have from my litter, Avanna, maybe carrying bi-color as well. She herself is sable. I assume this as she is different in a few ways then the other girls were (structural more masculine and large, coat type very rough to touch and different markings than her littermates) This was also the pup who had the "brindle" looking striping at birth. I tested her on the k-locus which was negative for brindle but positive for sable k^y. Did not test her on the a-locus though.

GSDlinage, I just saw a picture from a friend of mine's daughter holding a wolf pup from a zoo. The feet/pastern were similar marked...black with grey paws, same kind of round shape where the black falls off. Wonder if thats the "wild gene" A^w, also called wolf type gene.

Bi colour = Tan point

Black and tan can be very light to very dark. I still say those dogs MFH posted have too much tan to be bicolor, due to the location of the tan. It's not just how much tan, it's where it's located. Tan or red behind the ears, shading or whatever someone wants to call it, is not a bicolor. It's a very dark black and tan. I'd use the term melanistic. I, personally, don't see the importance of this topic and am not going to argue about it, but I have to admit I don't understand what's so tricky about bicolor vs. black and tan or what's wrong with black and tan that everyone wants to call the dogs bicolors, as if it's somehow superior, lol. If a dog has an all- black belly, toe penciling and tarheels, NO COLOR BEHIND EARS or onto neck, only tiny cheek dots or eyebrows, is all black in rear except for tan circle under tail, has all black pants, it's a bicolor. If there is color anywhere else, not a bicolor. 

We have previously established that penciling and tarheels are not exclusive to sables that carry black. As example, Galant z Pohranicni straze and Zidane v h Sevens have those markings, but are not black carriers.

Could be that bicolor is just a less dominant degraded strain of the tanpoint allele, just as tanpoint (black/tan) alleles are just a mutated and less dominant variation of the wild type (sable) alleles. The basic principle that; "All agouti variants are due to mutated sable alleles" also allows the presence of "patterned sables" to be less confounding. Therefore, I find the notion that there could exist a precisely defined bicolor phenotype to be a pointless affair, considering that the genotype involved is a matter of fuzzy difference. Basically, the most degraded functional allele holds the least dominance in phenotypic expression.

Family strains of similar patterns sometimes have very distinct differences from those of other families. REMEMBER: alleles are not atomic elements, and should not be expected to be uniformly identical to one another. The dark sable Anrebri dogs are very distinct from the dark sable Haus Iris dogs. Black dorsal and ventral stripes of sables are controlled from the agouti locus, yet some have black ventral stripes, and some do not. Some saddles extent more than others, some blankets extend more than others. Molly's bicolors differ from other near variations, so she exempts them from her definition of "true bicolor". I'd say, give her the exclusive, and just put it to rest.

Daryl, here is a pup from our old DDR line. I would call him a black and tan with reverse mask. The pic is an late 80s photograph scanned into the computer, therefor his legs look more yellow/white than they actual were.
Axel von der Gartenklause

Nice.  Do you know if he carried recessive black?