Chinchilla Mutation Information
We love our chins and are willing to anything we can to give our chins the greatest chance to be the best chin they can be.
And just like in Humans, it's all in the genes. (Mouse over the bolded terms for examples)
- Mutation
A mutation is a chinchilla that is not a Standard Grey
;
however every chin is some kind of mixture of a Standard Grey. Make sense? To better understand this, let's look at a
great tool, the Chin-Cross Calculator provided to us by Silverfall Chinchillas.
You'll see the default for both Sire and Dam are Standard Greys, meaning they are void of any mutation colors. To some, this would make Standards as not as exciting as the mutations. But what it really means is that Standards are the foundation of all mutations. Because of this, if you want to breed, you always need to keep Standards in the gene pool to keep the mutation genes strong. Pretty much the same theory on cloning. Once you cross clones with each other, over time/generations, the base genes get weaker.
If you play with the various settings, you see your chinchilla color will change. For example, our chocolate chinchilla Kennedy
;
She is a mixture of Hetero-Beige
;
and an Extra Dark Ebony ("Homo")
;.
In Kennedy's life time in our herd, we have only matted her with lil Man
;
who is a Hetro Ebony (Light Ebony). If you set him as the Sire and Kennedy as the Dam and click the "Calculate Breeding Results"
button, you'll see what the probabilities of kits will be.
Their first litter gave us a Medium Ebony (Puffin)
;
and a Medium Tan (Peyton)
;.
Their second litter gave us a Dark Ebony (Riley)
;
and a Medium Ebony (Gunther)
;.
For our Pink White chins (Matilda
and Snow
),
they are a cross of a Homo-Beige
; and a White. The normal flavor of
White is either a Mosaic (Wilson)
or a silver.
We tried to pair Kennedy up with Louie
to try and produce a Brown Velvet. If you put that into the cross chin calculator, you'll see there are 20 different possibilities. Well turns out that they did not
really get along so we'll have to go at that with George
and Lucy
. Lucy has been with
Preston
for a while, so our Brown Velvet will have to
wait until the fall breeding time.
- Lethal Gene
There are 2 gene types that you should not mix due to a possibility of have still born kits. The cross chin calculator shows you these two types.
NEVER mix Whites together or Touch of Velvets (TOV) together. Both have a 25% lethal probability. A still born (dead) chin can be not only a terrible feeling for you; bit can have a traumatic affect on the Mother who could in turn neglect the chins that survived. TOVs and Whites are ok to mix.
