So, I now finally discovered the color of our original female gerbils…
BLUE !!!!
Blue is a fairly new color found in gerbils. Originally they were found in Finland and about 10 years ago a breeder decided to bring a couple of blue gerbils to America to start a good organized blue gerbil breeding program.
They are still fairly hard to find and also fairly hard to breed, because a blue gerbil has a double recessive d gene.
I am so excited to have found this out!!
Our gerbils didn’t have the Agouti pattern, and they appeared too light colored to be slate. So for the longest time, I doubted between grey agouti and light slate, but if I remember correctly the breeder where I got them from had only these grey-ish gerbils. Only a few were spotted and we chose them. The father was black I believe. So I figured it can not be an agouti, because then you would expect a white belly and different agouti colors since that is the dominant gerbil color.
So we are going to try to create more blue gerbils! I am very curious what will come out of the second litter of Kingston and Flurry.
The above images is from our females when we just got them. Here they are around 6 weeks old. So best guess at the moment is that they are all blue. One Dilute Black and two Spotted Dilute Black. The spotting makes the dilute effect stronger, so that’s why they appear to be lighter than the other one.
Although it seems to be true that blue gerbils change colors over time. The one on the right became much lighter when she got older and the one in the back turned darker.
