xfactor fan wrote:Jorge.
One of the things that you have been looking at has been the transmission of which gray gene a horse passes on. In cases where there is only one gray parent, it is obvious. Where there are two gray parents, impossible to figure out.
Looking at the rate that Tapit's offspring are turning white, might this be a way of sorting out the genes? For example if one gray gene is from a line that is known to gray late, and the other from an early gray line, could you look at when the offspring starts turning gray, and make a good guess?
Just a thought. Has Tapit been bred to any gray mares?
Xfactorfan,
Thanks for bringing up this issue. In essence, that's the very same
question that was asked by yours truly to a world reknown authority, specifically, focusing on the way Native Dancer stamped his gets
vis-a-vis the way the grey mare Kanace stamped her foals.
This in order to determine whether JIG TIME's grey color was due to Native Dancer or Kanace. (Keeping aside the angle that JIG TIME seemed to be an homozygous grey).
The interest in answering this question was to know if we can include
JIG TIME as a grey-tail-male-lineage descendant of Nativa Dancer or not.
The answer I received was that regardless of the fact that you could ascribe any atypical phenotypical trait or pattern to the grey color of Native Dancer there was no reliability in affirming that JIG TIME was passing on Native Dancer's grey genes. In other words, (figuratively speaking) once two hen eggs are poured into a bowl, the cook will
immediately scramble both eggs and you can forget about which ingredients belongs to whom.
So, I guess that the same logic applies to Tapit and his
very-white-looking foals. As far as I have observed there seems
to be no sure thing with the velocity of the transmission of the
greying-out pattern because in the case of Vigors (1973) his gets
seemed to be all normally graying-out equines.
Certainly this is a very interesting topic worth reading many many opinions, especially from our breeders.