Amberlinks

[tec27]

Okay this is my first time hatching chicks and mixing breeds and such so i had a question. Obviously if you breed two purebreds together you will get the same breed chick. However i know Amberlinks are a hybrid (RIR, and something else). I dont know what the other parental generation is. Google said it was a plymouth but im not sure. However, so my neighbor is giving me fertilized amberlink eggs (mother and father both being Amberlinks). So what would the offspring be? Taking genetics in college i know when you breed two hybrids together there will be a 1/4 of a chance of getting a purebred (the breed of the mother), 1/4 of a chance of getting a purebred (the breed of the father), and 1/2 a chance of getting the hybrid (Amberlink). Is this the case for Amberlinks, or are amberlink offspring all amberlink?

 

[Ridgerunner]

Interesting question. I am not familiar with Amberlinks, but my understanding is that they are made by crossing a rooster with Silver over a hen with Gold, the reverse of a normal red sex link. So the chicks are not sex links. All of them should have yellow down at hatch. And there is no guarantee what the original breeds were to create your Amberlinks unless you have specific knowledge. Someone may use Delaware over a New Hampshire while someone else may use a White Rock over a RIR or even a Buff Orp. Or they will use some other combination.

So the pullets from this hatch will have a Silver from their father and give it to their sons. The roosters will be split for Silver and Gold, and will give one of these, no telling which, to all their offspring. Use S for Silver and s for Gold.

So you will get second generation chicks where the roosters all have a silver gene from their mother and should be about 50-50 split either SS or Ss. So the males at hatch should all have yellow down. They may grow up and feather out as Silver, or some type of offwhite, cream or yellow-gold like a regular red sex link rooster. Patterns of course will depend on which parents were used to make the original cross and which specific pattern-affecting genes they inherit. You could get bleed-through of he gold on some of them. With crosses of crosses, the possibilities open up a lot.

The second generation females will not get the Silver from the mother. They will get nothing from her. About half should get Silver from their father and half will get Gold. So at hatch, about half the female chicks should be yellow and half will be reddish. Again pattern will depend on the original parents and may vary depending on what they inherit. There are several other genes that can affect color so even with silver and no gold, that white could be some variety of off-white, not necessarily pure brilliant white. And the ones that are reddish at hatch could wind up various shades of red, possibly anything from dark red to more of a buff, depending somewhat on the original parent breeds. Let me clarify. With the same original parents, these second generation reddish chciks could be different shades of red. And it gets more complicated than that. If the original parents had certain white genes (there are two different possibilities for white genes), then the gold may be masked at hatch and these chicks may show yellow down even with the gold gene. In this case, much less than half the chicks could be reddish at hatch with more than half having yellow down.

It is not as straightforward as 1/4 purebred. There are several different genes involved in basic color, and several more involved in pattern and pattern color. And not all are dominant/recessive. Some are partially dominant and some express themselves differently depending on what other genes are present. When you cross crosses, you really can get a lot of different results. Some will look a lot like the Amberlinks but some will look a lot different.