breeding.

[KWAK]

Will parents breed with their off spring?


any defects in the chicks ?

 

[6littlechickies]

Short answer: Yes and they will continue to as long as you let them.

Longer answer:
Generally back mating to a parent is acceptable to a degree, when trying to lock in a color or pattern or there are a limited # of birds. This process has been cited by large peafowl breeders who work with new colors. Look up on Leggs peafowl and look at the history of some of the colors. With breeding to parents, there is potential for bad mutations or genes as with any other animal. You would not want to keep doing this for too long without introduction of new genes. Eventually you may breed sickly or generally less hardy birds if you keep breeding back again and again and again......

 

[sourland]

Yes. Inbreeding intensifies all traits both good and bad. With proper selection tightly bred families can produce perfectly normal individuals. In another life I worked in a laboratory environment. Some of the mouse strains we utilized had been inbred for 50+ generations.

 

[KWAK]

Quote:
HOLY COW 50?


Thanks sourland and 6lil.

 

[AquaEyes]

Quote:
HOLY COW 50?


Thanks sourland and 6lil.

Yes, there are many named highly-inbred strains of mouse used in laboratories. The goal is to have mice that are virtually identical. Realize, however, that early on in the creation of these lines, there had to be a lot of culling out of sickly mice. Once the "bad" recessive genes reared their ugly heads in homozygous form, those traits could be removed from the breeding pool, and in the end, a strain of near clones could be made that lacked harmful recessive genes. Mice also have a much shorter generation time than peafowl (weeks as opposed to years between birth and sexual maturity), and the "proper selection" mentioned above means you'll potentially have lots of sickly offspring to cull before you'd be sure you have a healthy inbred line.



~Christopher

 

[6littlechickies]

Quote:
HOLY COW 50?


Thanks sourland and 6lil.

Yes, there are many named highly-inbred strains of mouse used in laboratories. The goal is to have mice that are virtually identical. Realize, however, that early on in the creation of these lines, there had to be a lot of culling out of sickly mice. Once the "bad" recessive genes reared their ugly heads in homozygous form, those traits could be removed from the breeding pool, and in the end, a strain of near clones could be made that lacked harmful recessive genes. Mice also have a much shorter generation time than peafowl (weeks as opposed to years between birth and sexual maturity), and the "proper selection" mentioned above means you'll potentially have lots of sickly offspring to cull before you'd be sure you have a healthy inbred line.



~Christopher

Also keep in mind that as you shrink the gene pool, you will also potentially have birds that have less resistance to a certain disease. It could be one rare thing that wipes them all out because they don't have even small differences in immune resistance. Scientists have seen this as a problem in wild species that are not in a controlled environment. The cheetah has this problem where the gene pool is not diverse enough and this can pose a problem to them in the future. It is much easier to raise, cull, and select a gene pool in a very controlled scientific environment.

Now that being said, it is very beneficial to do bottle necking of the gene pool and select for identical mice or other test animals in a lab . It is one of the best ways to get solid scientific data where you take some of the variants out of the equation by using "identical" mice.

AquaEyes
Like your thoughts on peafowl and the scientific swing you put on things. Good for new ideas here on the forum and I liked reading the post on peafowl showing two phenotypes for color.

 

[AquaEyes]

Thank you for those kind words! Being new to a long-established forum, I can't help but be amazed at how friendly and welcoming this place is. Keep in mind that my only "fowl" at the moment is my 20YO male DYH amazon parrot Sammy, so I'm living vicariously through everyone's stories and pics. Keep 'em coming!



~Christopher