The Sizzle Thread! - Page 12

Country-sorry to hear about the bird you lost. 

 

To answer your question I sat down and played with the foot genetics:

 

Foot genetics based on 4 toes being recessive and 5 being dominate

(You can substitute any of the recessive traits such as single comb, silkie feathers, etc in instead of the 4 toed foot)

 

Four toes: fo

Five toes: Fi

 

F1 Generation:

Cochin x Silkie

fofo x FiFi = foFi, foFi, Fifo, Fifo.  All the same, 5 toes.  Most of the traits that we don’t want are recessive, so this generation would look pretty good.

 

F2 Generation:

F1 Sizzle x F1 Sizzle

Fifo x Fifo = FiFi, foFi, Fifo, fofo.  75 % chance of Five toes, 25% chance of 4.  No culling would have been done yet though and each chick would have a 1 in 4 chance of having each recessive fault.  As Country said, F2 is a bit of a mess.

 

 

F3 Generation:

Assuming we cull the fofo (four toed chicks) from F2, possible combos are:

FiFi x FiFi = 100% FiFi, all five toes, you would never get a four toed chick from these

FiFi x Fifo = FiFi, FiFI, Fifo, Fifo, all have five toes, 50% carriers of four toes

Fifo x Fifo = FiFi, foFi, Fifo, fofo  same as F2 generation, however much less likely as you will probably have chickens in the two other groups as well.

 

F4 Generation and moving forward from there.

You will be working with more and more FiFi, the likelihood of fofo will decrease.

 

You can see that if you cull a trait, the likelihood of it popping up becomes less and less.  However, each trait you select against mean more chicks you have to hatch.  The way the traits fall, it isn't twice as many chicks to select against a 2nd trait, its 4 times as many.  However, 5 toes is a “instant reveal”, meaning you don’t have the grow the chick out to see that they have it, so you could select against that, and one other trait in F2 and eliminate those.  However I think how most breeders do it is they grow out a bunch of birds, select the ones that most resemble what they are going for, breed those, and repeat.  

 

Country, you asked if I had a bird who was really nice but had a fault, would I cull her?  Culling is really subjective.  A bird you cull might be breeding stock to someone else who isn’t as far along.  I don't know what trait you were talking about but I've got the toes on my mind so I will go with that.  I would not cull for 4 toes right now as I’ve only got a handful of breeding stock and I know I can get rid of it easily in the next generation.  I’ve got a good market for PQ chicks, so I can hatch extra, sell off the 4 toed chicks as pets.  Just doing that every generation is enough to make your rate of 4 toed chicks go down.  If you really wanted to, you could do a test mating with your roo’s (breed them to a fofo hen), but I’m not sure I would bother.  Your rate will go down really fast even without doing this.

 

Lets say instead of the F2 gen above you do sizzle back to silkie

 

So

F1 Sizzle x Silkie

Fifo x FiFi = FiFi, foFi, FiFi, Fifo  100% chance of five toes, only 50% carriers.

 

That’s improved things drastically but what did we do to the feathering?

 

Bs x ss = Bs, ss, ss, sB   50% barbed feathers.  In the F1 sizzle to F1 sizzle we would have had Bs x Bs = BB, sB, Bs, ss  75% Barbed feathers.  So we lost 25% barbed feathers but really improved the other traits.  If I was starting a brand new line, I’d do this.  You could instantly select for 5 toes and 1 week later select for barbed feathers, then you could cull for other traits as they grow up.  Obviously you will be hatching lots of chicks in order to be left with a decent amount to go forward with.  As I said, the more traits you select against, the more you will have to hatch. 

 

 

 

Wow, my head's spinning.  I'm going to stop right there.    I will look this over for mistakes tomorrow.  Too bad we can't save a draft on here! 

LOL, it amused me too when I was working on it.

BTW, I don't think I fully answered the question. If the hen has a trait easy to get rid of, like the toe issue, I would use her. If its something you've pretty much gotten rid of, that takes longer to get rid of, like a single comb (because you have to grow them out to see it), I probably wouldn't. No matter the generation or background of the sizzle, if you can see a trait and know its recessive, then the bird has two copies of it.

Country- what colors of cochin did you start with? I'm curious if there was a mille fleur in there somewhere.