Question about what can fertilize what?

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LilPatchOHeaven

LilPatchOHeaven

Hatching
Aug 29, 2015
3
0
7
Tennessee
Hey y'all. I have a question, I am new to breeding chickens, so I was wondering if an English Orpington rooster can fertilize a gold or black sex link hen's egg? I have an English Orpington rooster and Gold Sex Link hens and Black Sex Link Hens.
 
You will loose the aoutosexing feature of the sex links chicken if you will breed them. This feature is shown only in F1,( first generation) and not in the future generations.
 
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Chickens are all the same species, regardless of breed. Any male chicken will willingly fertilize any female chicken of reasonably compatible size. Sometimes tiny bantam boys can't hit the mark on larger hens, but most of them will have fun trying! And the flip, a giant rooster will try to fertilize a small bantam hen, but it won't be as much fun for her
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this isn't a fertilization question but rather an egg color question that i hope someone can answer...our rooster is a cross from a Rhode Island Red rooster and a White Leghorn hen...the flock he belongs to is made up of 1 Rhode Island Red hen, 1 Rhode Island White hen, and 8 Barred Rock hens...all of which lay brown eggs...so my question is when this roo fertilizes these hens eggs...what color eggs can i expect? Does the fact that the roo is half rhode island red and half white leghorn have any influence of the egg color when mating with a hen that lays brown eggs?
400
 
The color of the egg is decided by the hen. In your flock you have only brown eggs layers so all the eggs that you will have will be brown eggs. But if you will hatch from the eggs that your rooster fertilized, the hens that you will get from them could have some lees brown color in the shell.
 
Akrnaf2 said:
The color of the egg is decided by the hen. In your flock you have only brown eggs layers so all the eggs that you will have will be brown eggs. But if you will hatch from the eggs that your rooster fertilized, the hens that you will get from them could have some lees brown color in the shell.
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Both hen and rooster contribute egg shell color genes. There are technically only two colors for egg shell; white and blue. Brown egg layers have additional genes that causes a brown 'coating' to be applied to the egg shell prior to being laid. With your flock, you would end up with mostly brown egg layers and maybe a few white egg layers.
 
All chicks get half their genes from the male and half from the female. The male offspring get one Z from the father (and half of his other genes) and one Z from the mama (and half of her other genes). The female offspring get one Z from the male (and half of his other genes) and and one W from the female (and half of her other genes). Chicken sex genes (Z & W) are not like human sex genes (X & Y). The hen is ZW and the rooster is ZZ. The egg color is determined by the dominant allele. All the chicks should carry the dominant color but the resulting color of their eggs will be a blend, depending on what color their mother's eggs were. In your case, the mother's eggs will be brown so the offspring's eggs will be some shade of brown (although some of them could be a very light shade of brown such as a cream or beige).
 
I think Akrnaf2 was clarifying that the rooster does not effect the color egg a hen he mates with lays. We've had folks think that adding a blue gene rooster to their current flock will change their current hens to blue egg layers, after all, so it was not an out of line thing to say.

Carrie, I agree you'll get all shades of brown from pullets from that cross. Some may be pretty light, due to the white influence from the Leghorn, but they'll all be genetically brown. That Leghorn blood might help boost production a bit, though. I was always happy throwing a Leghorn rooster in with my girls for a season, the increased production and egg size seemed to carry down through a few generations.
 

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