Black copper Maran breed to a blue

If I breed my blue Maran rooster to my black Maran hens will they be black or blue and my blue he throws a blue splash or so the guy I bought him from said! My black copper is not old enough to breed just yet so will it matter if my blue breeds or do I need to keep my blacks all together breeding wise will my blue throw a
Splash with a black or only
With a white thanks

If you breed a blue copper marans rooster to a black copper marans hen, you will get 50% blue chicks and 50% black chicks. You will not get any splash. To get splash, you would need to breed your rooster to a blue or splash hen. He will not throw a splash with a white hen unless that hen has dominant white and she also carries blue or splash underneath.

Thanks so much I have tried to figure this out and made my self loopy your awesome

You're welcome!

Pyxis said:

If you breed a blue copper marans rooster to a black copper marans hen, you will get 50% blue chicks and 50% black chicks. You will not get any splash. To get splash, you would need to breed your rooster to a blue or splash hen. He will not throw a splash with a white hen unless that hen has dominant white and she also carries blue or splash underneath.

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I do not understand what you are trying to say. If you breed Blue Copper to Black copper, you will most likely get Blue Copper and Black copper.

The way that genetics work with blue, black, and splash chickens, you are able to calculate the percentage of each color that you will get from each breeding by using a punnet square (or at least in theory, such as out of 100 chicks, with small hatches the percentages can be off, but in general out of a lot of hatchings the percentages should be accurate). It's not a 'most likely' thing - when breeding a blue copper rooster to a black copper hen, you will only get blue copper and black copper chicks, no splash. If you're confused I would be happy to explain how to do the punnett square and how it works You can do the same thing with other simple genes like the gene that causes a chicken to be a naked neck.

Edit: Actually I'm going to go ahead and explain how the color works for anyone that comes through here in the future. Blue, black, and splash genes can be written out like this.

Blue, when talking genetics, is usually written out as Bb, and black is bb, and splash is BB. These are how we write out the alleles. Using this, we can do a punnett square to see how breedings would work and what color we would get from each breeding. So if you were to breed a blue (Bb) to a black (bb) the punnett square would look like this:



Looking at this square, we can see that we will expect half of the chicks (50%) to hatch blue (Bb) and half to hatch black (bb).

If you breed the BC to the Blue copper, all the chicks will be either Blue Copper or Black copper, not Black or Blue. The Black copper from this mating should never be bred back into the original Black Copper blood as it will taint the pure BC Blood. The Marans are too scattered to try and breed to a genetic formula.

snowbird said:

If you breed the BC to the Blue copper, all the chicks will be either Blue Copper or Black copper, not Black or Blue. The Black copper from this mating should never be bred back into the original Black Copper blood as it will taint the pure BC Blood. The Marans are too scattered to try and breed to a genetic formula.

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My apologies for not putting copper after the black and blue, that is what I meant With my marans, back when I had them, the punnett square worked perfectly for whether or not they would be blue, black or splash as their base color.

Regardless, breeding a blue copper rooster to a black copper hen won't yield any splash chicks

Thanks so much I'm learning so much