Anybody clone quail?

[Squawkers]

Maybe next time say you're joking

 

[fowltemptress]

Cloning doesn't have an effect on personality. People who do pay to have a pet cloned are told that while the clone(s) will look like the original, they aren't guaranteed to behave the same

Who is saying they'll look the same? Unless you're cloning a breed with little phenotype variance, there's no way to guarantee a clone will look like the original.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

Who is saying they'll look the same? Unless you're cloning a breed with little phenotype variance, there's no way to guarantee a clone will look like the original.

Huh. That I was unaware of. The article I read (granted it has been years now) made it sound like the clones would be the same appearance as the original at each stage

 

[Susan Skylark]

Cloning exactly copies a genotype (genetic makeup), phenotype (what something looks like) may or may not be exactly the same depending on species, trait, gene expression and other variables. If nutrition, sun exposure, how something is sitting in the uterus, phase of the moon…whatever non genetic modifier can affect phenotypic expression in a certain species or color the cloned individuals may look different, but if the trait is purely genetic in determining the phenotype they will look exactly the same as well. The easiest example would be a cutting from a plant, it is an exact clone and will look exactly the same as the parent plant. But say you take the new plant and put it in higher or lower light than the original and his brings out more spotting in the leaves. Same genetics different expression based on an outside modifier, in this case light, and no I don’t have a clue on color genetics expression in quail!

 

[fowltemptress]

The epigenetic factors play a huge role. Even identical twins don't come out looking exactly the same because of variable factors within the womb - if you manage to remove one of those twins and throw it into an entirely different uterus (surrogate womb), you could wind up with identical siblings that don't look identical at all. The weird thing is, genetic expressions in clones are sometimes as much (and occasionally more!) varied as they are amongst the normally produced animals. There's been issues with it that we're still working on in our cloned agricultural animals. We can get in there and tweak things to try to ensure the animals look as similar as possible, but there are a lot of factors to account for and a lot of seemingly unrelated genes that for whatever reason also have an effect on appearances. A guarantee seems - irresponsible.

The biggest factor in how sweet my birds are seems to be the presence of older birds to kick their butts and teach them respect. I don't need to clone my sweethearts so long as I've got cranky old farts around. I've only ever had aggressive roosters come out of situations where they were raised without adult birds, and my naturally raised guineas are much less spastic than the ones I first got from a hatchery and brooded myself. It was mentioned Rocky was beat up by the girls - I wonder if your "clone" was picked on, as well? It could have nothing to do with it, but it would be interesting to know!