BEI Color Genetics HELP me understand please!!

[CityChicker]

Okay, mystery solved. You have Khaki Campbells. That is where the brown came from. A Khaki Campbell drake bred to a BEI female will give you female offspring that look like your ducklings. Are you sure one of your Khaki drakes didn't get in with the BEI or you got Khaki eggs mixed in? I remember you posted that one of your hens disappeared for a few days and you found her setting on a nest under a rabbit hutch. Me thinks she um, *befriended*, a Khaki Campbell drake. LOL

The chances that two different color mutations (blue and brown) would pop up in the same group of pure BEI is astronomically high, like one in a billion.

 

[citalk2much]

My friend 500+ miles away has them I have not moved there yet I only have BEI
and she disappeared in the animal hause that they can not get out of

 

[Scott]

There are black east indies and also the less common blue east indies. If I'm not mistaken a black east indies duck can carry the "blue" east indies gene. So even the parent duck may look like a regular black east indies, it can throw a blue east indies duckling. The same is true for many birds. I have split-to-white mandarin ducks... they look like regular mandarins, but can throw white mandarin ducklings. I would guess that your other ducklings will turn out blue east indies.

 

[CityChicker]

Then, they are probably mixes. The odds are too high that they are not. Were they ever around those Campbells that are on your website? Any other ducks in the last couple months? Any other eggs may have got in with your BEI eggs? Even when mutations pop up, they don't pop up in groups of different mutations in the same group of birds. Seriously, it would be one in a billion. I have never even heard of that happening before.

If there is no way that that Khaki drake bred them, then the original breeder must have done a recent outcross in their BEI. Even with that, it is genetically impossible to breed two black ducks and get blue, let alone silver (which you will get 25% Silver when two blues are bred together and blue as we know it is incompletely dominant, so you can always tell when a duck carries it, unless your birds have an odd unnamed blue gene in addition to the odd unnamed brown gene). The brown is even more puzzling, since there are very few common breeds that carry brown. The most abundant would obviously be Campbells, Chocolate Runners, and more rare Gold Welsh Harlequins. It is possible that your drake would have had one of the above as its' mother and is heterzygous for brown. Again though, it is hard to believe someone would purposely outcross to one of those breeds, but anything is possible.

Are you just pulling our legs? LOL

I can't tell, because your posts seem serious. LOL, either way, this has been good exercise for my brain, LOL.

 

[citalk2much]

no I am not kidding at all and I don't see the breeder these birds came from doing anything like that at all, it is my understanding that getting blue in BEI happens quite often keep in mind this is a trio so there are two hens and one drake I don't know if that makes a difference at all

 

[CityChicker]

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Blue in ducks is incompletely dominant, not recessive. When a duck carries blue you will, therefore, always be able to see it. Unless of course, there is a blue in ducks that has never been identified, which would be possible but very unusual. Solid white in ducks is recessive (I think it is a recessive in Mandarins as well, but someone else would have to verify that as I know more about the Mallard derived breeds). When you look at basic genetics, you are always going to be working with the same basic ratios.

For the example of white, if you breed a pure grey (wild type Mallard, not white C/C) to a visual white bird (c/c), you will end up with all birds that are visual wild type, heterozygous for white (all C/c). Now, if you breed these birds together, you will end up with a 1:2:1 ratio, 1 wild type (C/C), two wild type heterozygous for white (C/c), and one visual white bird (homozygous or c/c). This pretty much holds true just about whenever you are talking about one particular recessive gene to a gene that is completely dominant to it (there are other situations where the ratio might change, but that gives you the basics). So, a recessive trait is going to look and act different than an incompletely dominant trait.

The incompletely dominant trait, in this example Blue, is always going to show in the bird's appearance. The heterozygotes are Blue. The homozygotes are Silver. The only exception to this would be a different type of Blue (that would have to be recessive) that had never been named previously. Would be very rare, but certainly possible. The other possibly exception would be random mutation. Again, rare, but possible as that is pretty much where all the mutations have come from. The third possibility with the Blue from last year might be that the hens had been kept in a mixed run and maybe one remained fertile longer than normal. I don't think I have ever read a study on how long they can remain fertile, but I know people have gotten fertile eggs even a month later. I happened to set some eggs from some new bantam ducks that I got almost a month ago (so the eggs ranged from 2.5 to about 3.5 weeks after exposure to a drake) and the eggs are fertile, every one of them! So, it is possible.

 

[CityChicker]

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How cool! Obviously, I have no way of knowing who you are talking about, but I do know most of the *major players* in duck breeding personally and every single one of them utilizes outcrossing. I, personally, don't think there is any wrong with deliberate outcrossing. It has saved and established many a breed and even the word "mix" in ducks is very relative as they are all basically selectively bred Mallards.

If you had them for several months before you got Blue and no other ducks had been exposed to them and your ducks are black, then the blue had to be a form of recessive blue. I have studied duck genetics in tremendous detail and have never, ever seen recessive blue described in any of the literature. If that is what you have, that is very exciting! That still doesn't explain the brown ducklings though. It will be interesting to see how they mature.

 

[citalk2much]

I got these ducks from another BYC member who got them from the breeder and when she had them I do think she had them in a mixed setting I did not send the eggs in question for a little over a month to make sure they where pure but you are right I thought a month was planty of time to get any oops out of the way and I may have been wrong but as far as these ducklings go they are 100% from my trio When the blues hatched I thought nothing about it because blue is seen in east indies I guess Shelley will have to keep us all posted after she pick it up. I have also been told that silver pops up from time to time in east indies though rare.

 

[shelleyb1969]

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