A question of identity...or what will I look like

Sheltie's come in different colors.  Our past Sheltie's have been sable, which as they matured, all three had dark overlay to their coats.  When I saw the write up and talked to Tucker's breeder I did not fully understand when she said he was a sable merle.  I heard sable and assumed that he would be like our past Shelties.


This is Tucker's dad who is a blue merle.

Tucker's dad Nova

His mom is sable.  So what does this mean for Tucker?  What will he look like?  He won't look like dad.  Right now he is a lighter shade of sable with some hint of shading like any other sable.  His ears give away his merle breeding, which have a silver, grey tint to them as well as some of this same shade on a bit of his tail.  Also his one eye has blue on the outer rim.  This would be a fault it I wanted to show him for confirmation which I don't intend to do.  They are not allowed to have blue eyes, yet this is what is easy to have happen in a breeding with a sable and a blue merle.  Now I have read that a breeding a blue merle to a sable is not a good thing as the potential is to have then sable merle's which doesn't seem to be what a breeder wants.  In fact I read that a blue should only be bred to a black (tri or bi).  Hhhmmmm......So I learned that and wonder then why did Tucker's breeder do this.  She obviously has bred many dogs over time and what was the goal of this litter?  Of the litter there was one blue merle (like dad), one tri, three sable merle's, and one homozygous (which is a pup almost all white, this put had a sable color head and the rest of his body white), and two sable's.  The two sable's had the coloring that I remembered from our past sheltie's with a much darker shade of sable.

An example of a sable merle

Okay, it doesn't matter to me because he is just a cutie-pie.  He has the best outgoing personality and isn't scared of anything.