Combining colors

[AquaEyes]

I know enough to use them, but not enough to make them.

;-)

~Chris

 

[ChickenAlgebra]

And I'm so stinking lost, I have no idea....

We have an IB black shoulder male. The hens are 1 IB black shoulder pied, 1 IB black shoulder silver pied, 2 IB black shoulders, 2 purple and 2 purple silver pied. The purple girls are younger yet, so not breeding.

But the IBs are just IBs and no problems with parents there, the black shoulder and pied/silver pied are just patterns, right?

With the purple hens - do we find them a different male, or is the IB black shoulder male an ok cross? Or the other side is just have the peas for fun and no real attempts for breeding.

 

[AquaEyes]

Quote:
I'm not that knowledgeable about pied and silver pied, mostly because I prefer the solid colors and never really read much on how they're inherited. From what I gather...one pied gene makes dark pied, two pied genes makes loud pied.....ah, forget about pied. I'll just tell you how Purple and BS work together, and to save confusion by introducing the pied and silverpied, we'll just say "non-Purple" instead of figuring out what color and pattern they will be (though I guess color-wise, they'd be blue, with or without splotches of white...hehehe).



Black shoulder (BS) is recessive, so for it to show there must be two copies of the gene. Your BS male and 4 of your hens all show BS, so all the offspring from the 4 BS hens will have the BS pattern. Offspring from the other hens and your BS male will be split-to BS.

Purple is sex-linked recessive. That means it is carried on the Z chromosome. Boys have two Z chromosomes, and girls have one Z and one W chromosome. Thus girls need only one copy of Purple to show Purple (and they can't be split to Purple, because there's only one Z chromosome -- so in girls, with sex-linked, what you see is what you get). Because your male is IB, we know he does not have two copies of Purple (or else he'd be Purple himself). He could have one copy of Purple, in which case he'd be split-to Purple, but chances are that he's not, unless you bought him from someone who was breeding Purples. So from the Purple hens, their sons will be split to Purple (they got one copy from Mom), but the daughters will not be Purple (Purple daughters get the Purple gene from Dad only...Mom gave them a W chromosome, which turned them into girls). The only way to get Purple offspring is to have a male who is Purple, or is split-to Purple.

SO......if you kept a boy from either of those Purple moms (these sons will be split-to Purple), and bred him to either of the non-purple hens, then 50% of the daughters will be Purple. Since your non-Purple hens are all BS, then offspring (boys and girls) from this new pairing will also be 50% BS and 50% split-to BS. As far as combining Purple and BS, 25% of the hens will be Purple BS, 25% of the hens will be Purple split to BS, 25% of the hens will be non-Purple BS, and 25% of the hens will be non-Purple split to BS. With the sons from this cross, none will be Purple but 50% will be split-to Purple -- and you won't be able to tell by looking which are which. So, visually, they will appear as 50% non-Purple BS and 50% non-Purple split to BS.

If you took a son from one Purple mom and bred him to the other Purple hen, then you will get half Purple and half non-Purple, equally between boys and girls. So half the sons will be Purple, the other half will be split-to Purple. With the daughters, half will be Purple, and the other half won't.....but since girls can't be split to Purple, they won't be. Since these two purple hens are not BS and not split-to BS (or if they are, you didn't say so), breeding the split-to BS son from the first generation won't result in any BS offspring. Half will be split-to BS...and as I recently learned from DEERMAN (thanks), apparently split-to BS birds can be told apart from pure Barred Wing, so maybe you'll be able to pick them out.

Does that help?



~Christopher

 

[ChickenAlgebra]

Erm, sort of? So long as none of the crosses would be producing lethal problems, they are just for fun really, so any crosses wouldn't be a problem to us.

As for Daddy being a split - got me. He's a shelter pea, as are the 2 non pied IB girls. The person thought since they could keep 3 chickens in the city, why then 3 pea should be fine also. We'd already built the pea barn and run, just DD wasn't sure what color she loved best. Well, Daddy pea is pretty no matter what, and the hens were pretty dang cute also, so it just seemed like they were supposed to come home. Brought them home, and they were actually rather social birds, never had a problem with them other than them feeling at times that it's best to roost for the night in a tree once they were free-ranging.

Um, how we wound up with 5 more peas, well, yeah, they are like potato chips, you can't stop with the first handful?

So first year they were home, they were 1, so nothing. Next was 2 and Daddy pea thought he was hot stuff, the hens were ho hum whatever. Then the 3rd year they produced 2 eggs but neither hatched and we got the pied girls. Last year, produced eggs fine, one hatched but didn't survive the first day, and we got the purples. Supposed to get ONE purple. ONE. I repeat ONE.

I will eventually learn to NOT let DH and DD14 get birds without my supervision. I've said that for oh 7 years running now.

And now, Daddy pea is strutting his stuff for his pretty hens, and we'll see what happens now. And I'm still holding out for my white peas, which I know, we'd have to buy. My silver pieds have to do for now. Which is why DH figured if he was ordering more than they were supposed to, he should put some silver pied in there for me.

Thanks!

Amanda

 

[AquaEyes]

Quote:
Hahahaha....I wish I was so "unfortunate" as to have "too many peas." I've never had one. I've never had a chicken. I'm a city-boy, so my only birds have been the indoor kind.

If your male was a rescue, I doubt he's a split.

Well, being as you have one boy with lots of girlfriends, I'm sure he wouldn't mind much if you "borrowed" one to pair up with one of his sons someday. Following what I outlined above, there will be no inbreeding (assuming your peas you have now are all unrelated to each other). There is no "lethal" combination that I'm aware of with your birds. The only "lethal" anything I've heard of in peafowl was with some lines of Cameos, and from what I understand, that's been largely bred out of that color. I'm sure Deerman will have much more to say about that than I could. He has about as many (or more?) years with peafowl as I have with breathing.



~Christopher

 

[ChickenAlgebra]

I don't know enough on the IB SB girls, however they have a nest box they share that no one else uses and that one hatchling was so sickly and just "off" for lack of anything better - I think the male and those two are related. So from now on, no hatching from them.

The IB pied girls are not related. The two purples are same father, different mother. The pieds are full sisters, but different parents than the other two.

Not sure how to mix/match them to produce the flashy colors. I just like having the peas around, noise and all. At least they have brains, unlike the weird guineas. So no big deal, we'll just have fun with them.

Thanks!

Amanda

 

[Rosa moschata]

Well, it certainly took a few years, but it's nice to see that "combining colors" is not only (obviously) possible, but also is producing some beautiful new peafowl.

http://www.leggspeafowl.com/home.html

 

[Arbor]

Well, it certainly took a few years, but it's nice to see that "combining colors" is not only (obviously) possible, but also is producing some beautiful new peafowl.

http://www.leggspeafowl.com/home.html

I don't understand how I missed this thread back then - lol - it was already happening when you started this thread!

 

[Dany12]

Quote:

This bird is what is called a "halfsider" and the condition is not capable of being transmitted to further offspring. It is a random event not caused by genes but (probably, see below) a mistake in cell-division very early in development (when the organism is only at the few-cell stage). Yes, I know this is in different species, but the principle doesn't change.

http://www.budgerigars.co.uk/genetics/halfside.html

http://www.euronet.nl/users/hnl/halfside.htm

http://www.google.com/images?q=half...ZGI_rgQeco5HJCw&ved=0CDgQsAQ&biw=1280&bih=621

So while one article proposes nerve damage as the origin of halfsiders, other people believe it is the result of a mosaic condition. Here's the simplified explanation:

We start out as one cell (a fertilized egg). That one cell undergoes mitosis (copying and division) to become many cells. Sometimes there is an error in the division, and if that error doesn't kill one of the cells, the error will be passed down to all descendants of that cell. Imagine you have a one-page document. You make copies on a xerox machine, but not in the conventional way -- you do one at a time. Take the original, scan it, make one copy. Then take the copy and make a mark on it. Now make another copy of the original, and a copy of the marked copy. Continue making one copy of each sheet of paper you have. Soon, you'll have a lot, and you'll notice that half of them have a mark from that first copy. Same thing happens with the cells -- they maintain that original copying error down the line. In the organism, cells begin to occupy distinct positions and start forming something of a definite shape. Now the copies with the mark may be all on one side, and the copies without the mark on the other. The organism continues to grow, develops, and is born/hatched. If the original copying-error affects a gene (or whole chromosome) that affects coloration, you will see a difference from one side to the other.

This "halfsider" will not be able to pass on the "halfsider" condition because it is not something caused by genes. Some halfsiders are sterile (look up gynandromorph) because the "left side vs right side" is not just a difference in color, but a difference in gender (male left side, female right side, or vice versa). Only in species which are sexually dimorphic (boys and girls look different) is this apparent. Quite striking examples can be found in Eclectus parrots, where boys are green and girls are red/blue. Gynandromorph halfsider Eclectus parrots will be green on one side, and red on the other.

There are other, more common, forms of mosaicism. A great example is calico or tortoiseshell cats. Remember that in mammals, it is the male who has the different sex chromosomes, and the female has two of the same (males XY, females XX). Only one X chromosome is required for life functions, so in females, the other must be mostly "turned off." So, at a certain cellular stage after an egg is fertilized (I don't remember which stage, but it is much further along than the "halfsider" moment), one of the female's X chromosomes is mostly inactivated. Determining which X chromosome is completely random, but all cells descending from those cells will maintain the same X inactivation. So let's say one cell inactivates the X from mom -- all cells descended will have mom's X inactivated.

In cats, the red and black color alleles (same gene, different versions) are located on the X chromosome. This is why calico (red, black and white) or tortoiseshell (red and black) cats are (almost) always female, because in order to have both alleles (red and black), they need to have two X chromosomes. The rare males that are tortoiseshell or calico usually result from being XXY and are often sterile.

OK, so now look at a calico cat. One of her parents carried black, the other carried red. Let's say Dad was black and Mom was red. The calico gets one X from each. Early on in development, one X is randomly chosen for inactivation, and then development continues. When you see the patches of red and black, you can see which X was inactivated. The red patches arose from cells in which Dad's X was inactivated (black turned off, red turned on), and the black patches arose from cells in which Mom's X was inactivated (red turned off, black turned on). This is why distribution of red/black color in calico cats is impossible to breed for. This is also why, a few years back, the first cloned cat looked different from the original. WHY they picked a calico cat is beyond me, but the cloned offspring was not calico. Why? Because, as I mentioned earlier, whichever X is inactivated will be maintained by all future mitotic descendants of that cell. Take a tissue sample from a "black" region and the whole clone will have red turned off, even though genetically it is still calico (has one red and one black allele). And that's what happened. Oh, and the white spots in calico are controlled by a separate gene for white spotting.

The point of the whole thing is that when you see some sort of mosaic individual, the mixed pattern results from cellular differences, not a new kind of "pied."



~Christopher

The only peacock for me, suspected of being a "half sider" is this one:

 

[Dany12]