Turkeys For 2013

[Arielle]

Merry Christmas!!!

 

[chickadoodles]

I am raising Self Blues (Lavender) that I got from Porter this spring. Two reasons I got them, one was to outcross to my existing Slates since I thought they were getting a little too inbred. Two was to introduce brown eyes, since my Slates and one Self Blue are all blue-eyed. Well guess what, the birds are over 6 months old now and I just finished catching all my hen turkeys, banded them, and rearranged into the breeding pens for this coming year, and all 3 of the Self Blue hens have blue eyes! One of the Self Blue toms has definite brown eyes, and the other one has sort of 1/2 and 1/2 brown-blue. I put the brown-eyed tom over my Slates and the other one over the Self Blues. Personally, SOP and blindness issues aside, I like the look of the blue eyes in the Slates and Self Blues.

I do love the Slate Blues as well that is why I bought them I loved the look of the blue eyes also. I would call and ask Porter why he is selling blue eyed Blue Slates. Good luck with breeding out the blue eyes. My DH wants to get some larger birds this year and he likes the Bourbon Reds also.

 

[chickadoodles]

Blue eye color is not a cause of blindness, but in some animals there is an association between very light blue eyes and poor vision (and other neurological problems, such as deafness). In other words, the same genetic problem that causes the blindness or the deafness or the other neuro issues also cause the "abnormal" eye color, so there's an association, but not a cause-and effect, relationship. However, the majority of blue eyed animals have no medical problems at all.

Your post made me pull out both my SOP and my British Poultry Standards (BPS). My BPS is current, but my SOP is 1998, so things may have changed in the last 15 years. I have checked the general disqualifications section, the eye disqualifications section, and the turkey disqualification section, and I also can't find mention of blue eyes being a disqualification. There is a 2 point deduction for the eyes not matching in color. and proper eye color is worth 2 points, but those are the only mention of eye color penalties I could find.

Even if this was a DQ, I would still keep and use this particular tom with matching bicolor eyes. He is excellent in other ways, and a tom with bicolored eyes mated to a hen with brown eyes logically should produce a large portion of poults with brown eyes. After a few generations of careful selection, I would think that the blue eye color would be eliminated, or at least be very rare.

I am glad to hear that the blue eyes are not a DQ. I am sorry. Good luck with your breeding program. I called the people that sold me mine and told them I was not happy with them as I had bought them to breed and they had blue eyes and went blind. I won't buy anymore birds from them.

 

[desertmarcy]

I do love the Slate Blues as well that is why I bought them I loved the look of the blue eyes also. I would call and ask Porter why he is selling blue eyed Blue Slates. Good luck with breeding out the blue eyes. My DH wants to get some larger birds this year and he likes the Bourbon Reds also.

But I did not get Slates from him, so I can't say that his Slates have blue eyes. I got the Self Blue from him. The Self Blues are produced from breeding two Slates together (50% Slate, 25% Self Blue, 25% Black). I had asked him a while back about eye color in turkeys. He had sent me this information. Not sure I totally understand how the eye color genetics works, though. I have a friend with a brown-eyed Slate hen who has promised to let me "borrow" her hen to breed to my brown-eyed Self-Blue so I can get some poults from that cross. I could have bought that Slate hen myself, but I had too many hens already, and my friend wanted another hen, so she bought her.

Information from Kevin Porter:
"~~~~I did some digging for you and found a bit of info by Franklin Albertsen on eye color. Eye color depends upon the base pattern present in a turkey. Black birds have black eyes, bronze and black winged bronze birds have brown eyes. If we restrict pigment formation with recessive white, or dilute, the black eye has reduced pigment and becomes blue, while the bronzes remain brown. Since black is dominant, and blue eyed birds have a black base, when crossed with brown eyed birds we get black eyed birds. If white or dilute is present in the mix, then we get blued eyed birds. BuTTTTT, unless you really know eye color, watch how you distinguish color in newly hatched poults. You might want to note that for years, regardless of mature eye color, the APA Standard listed the eye color of newly hatched poults for ALL varieties as "Iris lead color; pupil darker, almost black." Now, regarding the Beltsville eye color. Because both bronze and black base birds were used in its development, both brown and black eyes were found in mature birds. A half a century ago the ag college in Oklahoma suggested making blue eyes a standard to differentiate them from other white strains of turkeys, but most U.S. Beltsvilles remained brown eyed. During the last decade, some Canadian turkey breeders have used eyed color to refer to birds "that must have come from the Albertsen line in the states". In Canada most of their birds were blue eyed because of lack of selection against that color, but are continually working toward a brown eyed bird. Some of them have indicated that our birds are heavier muscled with more desirable conformation so that they have used eye color as an indirect indicator that they are also buying a better bodied bird."

 

[desertmarcy]

It is interesting, talking about blue eyes in animals, that the blue eye gene is dominant over brown in goats.

 

[Sydney Acres]

It is interesting, talking about blue eyes in animals, that the blue eye gene is dominant over brown in goats.

Is that in all breeds, or just the ones that are supposed to have blue eyes, such as the Nigerian Dwarfs?

 

[desertmarcy]

Is that in all breeds, or just the ones that are supposed to have blue eyes, such as the Nigerian Dwarfs?

I can't really say, I just know it is true of the Nigerian Dwarfs, but goats are all the same genus & species, right? So I would think it would hold true for all. Nigerian Dwarfs can have blue or brown eyes. There is no standard that I am aware of that says they are supposed to have blue eyes.

 

[Arielle]

What I find interesting is that eye pigment actually comes from the same genetic base as skin. Meaning that during development of the embyo, a few skin cells are pinched off by the devleoping eye tissue and is incorporated to be the pigment of the eye. THis is true of humans, I assume it is the same in all other species. Go figure. How does skin color decide eye color?

 

[Sydney Acres]

What I find interesting is that eye pigment actually comes from the same genetic base as skin. Meaning that during development of the embyo, a few skin cells are pinched off by the devleoping eye tissue and is incorporated to be the pigment of the eye. THis is true of humans, I assume it is the same in all other species. Go figure. How does skin color decide eye color?

Don't know all the details, but assuming that the iris tissue (the colored part of the eye surrounding the pupil) was initially skin tissue in the embryo, that doesn't necessarily mean that skin color determines eye color. The iris is a very specialized tissue, regardless of it's embryonic origin. Once it specializes, it will become whatever color it is destined to be genetically. All body parts start out as a single celled combination of sperm and egg, then repeatedly divides into more and more cells. Each division allows for more and more specialization of these cells until there's multiple types of cells, then organs, then etc, etc. The embryonic origin of a tissue doesn't always determine the final specialized tissue or color, since there are multiple directions that any one cell can go. That is why stem cells are so important in medicine and research. Using humans as an example, while it is true that MOST dark skinned people do have dark brown eyes, there are some very dark skinned people that have hazel or blue or green eyes, depending on the genetic combinations on both sides of the family. So even though the iris tissue may be derived from skin tissue, the genetics of how one specialized tissue develops is independent of the other.

 

[Arielle]

Quote:

Well said. IN humans, because we don't have feathers or fur to protect the skin are highly influenced by the intensity of the sun where our ancesters have lived for generations. I expect that eye color and skin color developed accordingly and hence northern low sunlight areas like Scandinavia have very light skin and pale blue eyes thru out the population.

In turkeys humans have selected them for hundreds of years now, not much natural selection in the feather colors or the eye colors. Alls it takes is a mutation and a human will propigate that trait. By the time the eye tissue has been pinched off, the skin tissue has already differenciated from the other two tissue types, but as you said there is still more cellular development long after that.

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