A colour question.......

[ru-fi-do]

I have have a flea bitten grey mare, she was dark dappled/roan when younger, would I have to find strawberry roan stallion to try and produce a strawberry roan foal? It's not something i'm looking at doing at this moment in time but very curious as it's something i'd like to do in the future maybe and find find the whole colour genetics thing fascinating..

 

[s4sugar]

Dapples roans are rare -was she a just slow to go grey?

What colours were her parents and what breeding is she?
Any foal she has has at least a 50% chance of being grey but you can have her DNA tested.

 

[Meowy Catkin]

What colour was your mare when she was born?

Does she have the roan gene, or did she just look similar to a roan as she greyed out?

A strawberry roan is a chestnut with the roan gene, so if the mare doesn't have any chestnut genes, it will be impossible to get a SR foal as you need two copies of the chestnut gene for it to show.

Is she homozygous or heterozygous for grey?

Is she breeding quality?

 

[ru-fi-do]

I have no idea whether she is homozygous or heterozygous for grey? To be honest I have don't have much idea about colour genetics, she was more roan when she firsy arrived, then she dappled and now she is mainly fleabitten (chestnut/brown) with some grey/roan on her legs.

5 year old

Now 12 yr

This one was in spring when she still had some winter coat so you can see her colouring more.

It is not something I'm definitely going to do but i'm just interested as to what colours I could get from her? A friend of a friend also has a very well bred appaloosa stallion.

 

[Meowy Catkin]

I would say (from the photos) that she doesn't have the roan gene. Do you know if just one or both of her parents were grey? If she has only one copy of the grey gene, then there is a 50% chance as S4S said of her having a grey foal. If she has two grey genes (homozygous) then she will 100%, guaranteed have a grey foal.

So to get a strawberry roan foal, she needs to pass on chestnut to her foal (if she has a chestnut gene to pass on). Hopefully she only has one copy of grey and she wont pass it on to the foal. You would then need a stallion that has both chestnut and roan to pass onto the foal. So it's actually quite a small chance that you'll get SR. It would probably be easier to buy a SR foal!