Appaloosas

Appaloosa patterns have been on my mind lately. Some of that comes from watching the changes in my own mare's pattern. After years of without much change, she has begun to roan more visibly.



She still has her rib stripes, though the background color is far closer to gray than chocolate these days. It never ceases to amaze me how very vertical the lines are. They do not follow the contour of the body (like the stripes on a zebra) or the direction of hair growth. Instead they look like someone drew them with a ruler.

I have been pondering the lines because I considered placing Sprinkle's pattern on an Oliver, but I need to do a little research on how the stripes appear in foals (if in fact they do at all). That's one of the pitfalls with appaloosa patterns; they are progressive so age matters.



Sprinkles did get more white hairs each year, but the process was so slow I thought she'd be quite old before she looked really different. Then last fall I noticed she was getting a few white dots on the back of her ears. I have tried a few times to photograph them, but getting her head to point away from me when I am holding something as interesting as a camera is hard to do!

This summer she started getting the same white dots on her legs. They are more numerous on her hind legs than her front, and far more to the inside than the outside. At the same time she is getting darker dots there, too, though they are much harder to catch since they are only visible in the right light. (The faded parts of her coat are somewhat iridescent.) The spots are quite muted and soft in outline, much like the Tetrarch spots some grey horses get.

You can also see that she has a completely shell hoof on that leg. Appaloosas have stripes on their hooves when they have solid legs, but when there are white markings they have shell hooves just like any other horse. That is, unless they are homozygous for the "master switch" for the appaloosa patterns. Those horses have shell hooves (or nearly so) no matter what color the leg is.

Which is why I find one of Sprinkle's buddies so interesting. I have shared pictures of Jag before. He is a black blanket appaloosa with the splash gene. He is certainly not homozygous because his blanket is spotted; homozygous blanket appaloosas end up as snowcaps.



These are the two sides of his blanket pattern. He certainly has spots. He also has the neatest white patches that run all along his spine up to his withers. One of these days I'll remember to get a shot of that, too.

So he is heterozygous and black. Yet his hooves are almost shell colored, they are so minimally striped.



I only got a shot of his two hind feet, but the front look much the same. They are faintly striped, and that one hind has a dark patch, but they are predominantly shell. Sprinkles, and most of the other genetically black appaloosas I have encountered, have had predominantly dark hooves on their solid legs. (I should mention that Jag has no white on his feet at all.)

I have wondered if this is just a normal variation of expression, or if it is related to his carrying the splash gene, or some other combination of factors. That is what makes appaloosas (and sabinos, for that matter) so very interesting to me. The appearance of the pattern depends on the interaction of many different genes rather than a single one, so it is a puzzle to determine which traits can occur in conjunction and which ones cannot.

Like I said, part of my interest comes from being around Sprinkles. But I am also looking forward to glazing, which I will begin again in earnest as soon as Elsie's molds are drying. Almost all the horses that come up next in line are appaloosas, or appaloosas in combination with some other pattern. I want to get all these little things right when the time comes, so I've been asking myself these kinds of questions.

Oh, and one last photo. This one is for my friend Sarah. Jag is the only pony at my barn that is plumper than my own, so when he turned to scratch his leg I just had to catch all those wrinkles for her!