Slate

Get ready for a dumbed-down lesson in genetics, because Slate is a bit of a doozy! Slate is a term I have personally coined to describe the variation of merle in Bernedoodles called "atypical" merle.  This is an unusual and rare variation of merle that creates a washed out look on the base colour and lacks the typical, patchy pattern of regular merle. In the case of slate the base colour is black. This phenomenon can affect chocolate (brown) coat colour as well, but the effect is less visually appealing as it washes out the chocolate into a cafe-type colour. To my knowledge, I am the ONLY Bernedoodle breeder (it is 2025 as I write this) that has this rare variant of merle and I may also be the only one who has it in ANY of the types doodles. It happened quite by accident. Our Patch, an Aussiedoodle, is a regular merle dog, although he barely expresses much merle - this is called "minimal merle". However, his puppies all came out with normal expression of merle. One day, I got a funny looking chocolate girl, named Malala, from our Bernie/Patch litter of January 2021. I recognized it as an atypical merle immediately, but thought that was very odd as the merle base pair numbers in a dog don't just randomly change (I am not going to explain all that, lol, if you know you know). Upon some investigation, it turns out that Patch is a mosaic and that he has M/m, Ma/m AND m/m gametes (normal is just two sets, not three). He must have VERY few of the latter, as he gave us quite a few litters and ONLY Addie was gifted the Ma allele. So, that's the story of how atypical merle came to be in the Moonstruck program.  Addie was bred to Rusty and that litter gave us two atypical merles - a girl (Vervet) and a boy (Mandril). We kept the girl, who's name became Penny. Slate is now a colour that will take some time to develop. Because there are no other doodles out there (that I am aware of), we will have to get a few generations in to see how this colour will behave on furnished coats. In Addie's case, she is an unfurnished dog, so the effects of progressive greying and fading - which are separate phenomena on their own - do not affect that coat-type, even if the dog possesses the genes for it. In Penny's case, it's quite likely that she just happened to inherit genes that caused her puppy colour at birth to silver out and tan points to fade. It's unlikely that this is the result of the Slate itself, rather just bad luck. We will continue to play with this nifty genetic variant and see where it takes us!!

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Click the pic to see the whole litter album

Stay tuned to see how
​these puppies turn out!

Furnished Coat

Unfurnished Coat

Furnished Coat