The mask covers up with black, the eeRed covers by bleaching.

The reason that i have been reading so much about border collie colors is because I have a gold dog with a liver colored nose. I have been trying to figure out if he is chocolate or not (or as the AKC calls it: red). I have been finding a lot of contradictory data online.

I don’t believe so many different options are linked to just one gene locus, and older research has made the mistake of assuming that certain options are just different alleles at one locus.

For instance, the “masking” modifier was not well appreciated until recently.

And I know there are more genes that we simply haven’t identified.

We’re still left with two puppies that have a small spot of chocolate surrounded by blonde. There is dilution here and some rather limited patterning. Call it merle or sable or piebald… but I don’t think what’s happening has a good name.

I now think Mara is a sable. Not exactly sure on the underlying color, but the tips and roots of her hairs, plus the undercoat resemble sable most. So does her son from the last litter… he looks Sable, although not a traditional color of sable.

I don’t know where this comes from as her mother was not sable (chocolate tri with random white spot) and her father was blue merle tri.

I think by blue you meant the one who is seal. If you read everything you can about seal you will realize that a puppy cannot be both seal and tri at the same time. Can you explain my misunderstanding? Because if your seal is indeed a tri color then my theory is proven wrong.

As for merle I know mostly what I read on the internet about the gene. You may well be right that the merle is being expressed in an unusual way. I just don’t remember reading about it before.

If I learn more I will post it here.

The darkest puppy isn’t black. If I held him up to any of the puppies from the Dublin x Celeste litter the difference in tone of his coat would be more clear. His coat is certainly light enough where the dark patches on his left rear leg are well defined and easy to spot.

I’ve never known a black dog to have such variegations. Sure, plenty of black BCs will display bleached out reddish hairs on their rear ends, but that’s environmental bleaching, not intrinsic color. Just look at how the chocolate puppy is MORE saturated than the blue tri.

I’m not certain if the blue and lilacs are accomplished due to the traditional dilution gene (meaning Mercury would have to be a carrier) or are diluted from the unique Merle gene (or another gene) from Mara (which would mean zero dilution contribution from Mercury).

I’ll post more photos that show the color progression as the pups age.

Likewise, red and chocolate are interchangeable, but they are both a base color, just like black. Black does not become chocolate through an additional gene, it’s an individual allele at the same locus that produces black.

So we get to pick:
{black, chocolate} {dilute, not dilute} {merle, not merle}

black + dilute = blue or slate
chocolate + dilute = lilac

So I suggest that the terms should be [black merle] [blue merle] [chocolate merle] [lilac merle]

You can replace red for chocolate or slate for blue, but NOT blue for black as is so often done in describing black merles as “blue merle.”