blue egg dominant?

[kefiren]

i have a pullet who gave me her first egg today. her mom is a leghorn. i thought her dad was our alpha--he is half cuckoo maran half americana. his sister lays olive eggs.

unless the chickens are pulling a fast one on me, the pullet egg is cream, no blue or green tint at all. i sort of expected something in the green family.

there is a chance that the dad was a BC maran. but no feather legs on her.

she is chubbier than her mother, and has a smaller comb but still a regular comb and not pea.

 

[quibs]

Blue and Brown are co dominant, while white is recessive. As far as I understand it; the chicken can only have two copies of a gene, blue will mix with brown to give you green, two blues will give a darker blue egg, blue and white will be a lighter blue, two browns will be dark brown, brown and white will be cream, two copies of white is the only way to get white

 

[kefiren]

so, i guess what you are saying is she got the cuckoo maran brown gene and the white and together they became cream? that makes sense, thx!

 

[Arielle]

Sorry to complicate things, the cuckoo marans is a brown eggs WITH a coating of brown paint. Two separate ways to color eggs. Granted the cuckoo ususally has less pain than the black copper marans, but it is still a factor. CHeck out the olive egger thread for a chart on colors. you may find your answer there. Or ask the members to point out the chart to you. GL

 

[kefiren]

her auntie has very little paint, thanks arielle

every now and then she will lay a speckled egg, and that seems to be the extent. maybe this pullet will too.

i'm excited for her, she is a sweet hen. this is the only hen i got from my groundhog hatch. a bunch of roosters and two pullets that got eaten by critters. why can't the critters eat the roos?

 

[Stacykins]

Sometimes it take a chicken a few lays to get their ink jets down correctly. It sounds like she did not inherit any blue egg shell gene. I am guessing if the rooster's Easter Egger parent was OO, the roo's genetics are likely Oo. His sister likely had the same mix, and the marans parent made for olive eggs. Because the mother of the girl who layed the cream egg is a leghorn, her genetics is oo. So the parentage of the cream egg layer is Oo x oo. That hen would only have a 25% chance of inheriting one copy of the Dad's blue egg gene, with a 75% chance of getting a white shelled egg gene (what happened). Mix that up with the leghorn's lack of pigment genetics which diluted the 'ink', and TADA! Tan/light cream eggies!

The gene for blue egg shells (OO or Oo is expressed as a blue egg) is indeed a dominant trait. White shells are totally recessive.

But a green or brown egg is a different beast. A green egg is a blue shelled egg with brown pigment, while a brown egg is a white shelled egg with the same brown pigment. Some breeds just add more 'ink' to the shell, hah.

Was I just confusing? I hope not.

 

[nicalandia]

when a hen has a suspected Ameraucana/Araucana/Easter egger as grand dad, if she lacks a pea comb that means she has 98% chances to lay non colored eggs(blue or green), if she has a pea comb then she has the same chance(98%) of laying a blue or green eggs, is she single combed like a leghorn? or pea combed?

 

[kefiren]

thank you stacykins and nicalandia

yes, she has a single comb, smaller than her mom's huge leghorn one, but still not a pea. so that makes sense.
she has greenish legs (rather than the normal leghorn color) and is a bit wider bodied. she is white like a leghorn. she is bolder than some of her clutch mates who had amer moms.

funny thing... i've done two clutches this year, and the leghorn blood is tough as nails. they are the only ones to make it through a rough broody hatch as well. hard shells, strong smart chicks.