Wednesday, April 11, 2012

"What's up?" Wednesday

This morning before turning the sheep out, I took some time to investigate a puzzle.

Here are fleece shots of Bittersweet, Annabelle's ram lamb.
shoulder area

hip area

scrotum

Looks clearly moorit, right? This would mean that white Annabelle's genes at the A locus must be Awt/Aa.

Here are fleece shots of Bloom, Annabelle's ewe lamb.
shoulder area

mid-side

hip area

Even though Bloom doesn't show any other signs of Ag, that is a lot of fading at the skin level - much more than I would expect from "side dusting" on a gulmoget. But her sire is clearly a moorit gulmoget, and her dam is Awt/Aa, so there's no possibility of Bloom inheriting the fading gene. What's up?

(The photos I took over the weekend are still languishing in an unopened file; I will get to them eventually.)

That's it for today from . . .

5 comments:

Christine said...

I'm stunned with how long their fleeces are already. Wow.

Michelle said...

They're not, really; just tight close-ups. The moorit ram lamb is pictured in the previous post and you can see how evenly crimpy his fleece is - but I wouldn't call it long.

Mary Ann said...

Greek to me :-)

Unknown said...

Unknown modifier gene?

Michelle said...

I'm wondering about that, too, Shelly.