Curiosity - Genetics, Colorings etc.

[RisingPhoenixFarms]

I've always bred Pekin ducks so i know yellow chicks, white adults. But never chickens so ...

My friend has asked me to hatch her out some chicks and I'm curious as to what they'll look like as hatchlings and also as adults. My Rooster is a Speckled Sussex. The hens would be BCM, RIR, PBR or SS. Obviously i know what the SS will look like but I'm curious about the other matches.

 

[NatJ]

My friend has asked me to hatch her out some chicks and I'm curious as to what they'll look like as hatchlings and also as adults. My Rooster is a Speckled Sussex. The hens would be BCM, RIR, PBR or SS. Obviously i know what the SS will look like but I'm curious about the other matches.

Please give the full breed names at least once, rather than just abbreviations, so there is no confusion about which breeds and colors you mean.

For example, I know of at least 3 kinds of "BCM":
Black Copper Marans
Blue Copper Marans
Blue Cuckoo Marans

 

[RisingPhoenixFarms]

Please give the full breed names at least once, rather than just abbreviations, so there is no confusion about which breeds and colors you mean.

For example, I know of at least 3 kinds of "BCM":
Black Copper Marans
Blue Copper Marans
Blue Cuckoo Marans

Black Copper Marans
Rhode Island Red
Plymouth Barred Rock
Speckled Sussex

 

[NatJ]

Black Copper Marans
Rhode Island Red
Plymouth Barred Rock
Speckled Sussex

With a Speckled Sussex rooster, you should get:

With the Black Copper Marans and the Rhode Island Red hens, chicks will look mostly like their mother's breed.

Speckled Sussex of course gives pure Speckled Sussex.

Barred Plymouth Rock should give black chicks. Sons will have white barring (light dot on the head at hatch, white lines on the feathers later.) Daughters will just be black. Both sexes may have red leakage in their feathers as they grow up.

Note, there is a breed called "Plymouth Rock" and one color is "Barred." So they are "Barred Plymouth Rocks." Or you can skip the "Plymouth" and just call them "Barred Rocks." Other colors would be White Plymouth Rocks (White Rocks) and Buff Plymouth Rocks (Buff Rocks) and so forth.

 

[RisingPhoenixFarms]

With a Speckled Sussex rooster, you should get:

With the Black Copper Marans and the Rhode Island Red hens, chicks will look mostly like their mother's breed.

Speckled Sussex of course gives pure Speckled Sussex.

Barred Plymouth Rock should give black chicks. Sons will have white barring (light dot on the head at hatch, white lines on the feathers later.) Daughters will just be black. Both sexes may have red leakage in their feathers as they grow up.

Note, there is a breed called "Plymouth Rock" and one color is "Barred." So they are "Barred Plymouth Rocks." Or you can skip the "Plymouth" and just call them "Barred Rocks." Other colors would be White Plymouth Rocks (White Rocks) and Buff Plymouth Rocks (Buff Rocks) and so forth.

Thankyou for that and for the education. As i said just curious i've never allowed a broody to hatch or hatched any of our own.

So the barred rock babies should be sexable at hatch? Neat!

 

[RisingPhoenixFarms]

I have some cream leg bar crosses (no idea what they are crossed with though, they are cream with black leakage around neck and black tail feathers. Any idea what this might look like with the Speckled Sussex rooster?

 

[NatJ]

So the barred rock babies should be sexable at hatch?

Yes, they should be.

I have some cream leg bar crosses (no idea what they are crossed with though, they are cream with black leakage around neck and black tail feathers. Any idea what this might look like with the Speckled Sussex rooster?

I expect the chicks would mostly look similar to their mothers, but probably some will have a richer red instead of the cream color.

 

[RisingPhoenixFarms]

So tell me if I'm understanding this correctly, a Speckled Sussex Roo doesn't carry dominant genes as far as coloring? Or is it just that the breeds of hens i have are more dominant?

Are hens the ones that carry the color genes?

Curiosity peaked more lol

 

[NatJ]

So tell me if I'm understanding this correctly, a Speckled Sussex Roo doesn't carry dominant genes as far as coloring? Or is it just that the breeds of hens i have are more dominant?

Are hens the ones that carry the color genes?

Curiosity peaked more lol

It's mostly the Speckled Sussex having recessive genes.

If you like to have chicks in many colors, a rooster with recessive genes is fun to have, because the chicks will mostly take after their mothers.

For comparison, if you had a Barred Rock rooster, all chicks would be black with white barring. Or if you had a White Leghorn rooser, chicks would be white with occasional bits of leakage in other colors.

If you would like to play with various color combinations, the chicken calculator can be great fun:
http://kippenjungle.nl/breeds/crossbreeds.html
This version lets you choose a breed in the top and put it in the calculator (Sussex, Speckled), and then you can change the genes in the dropdown boxes and watch the picture change.

The mottling gene (mo) is recessive, and most of your hens don't have it. So change it to Mo+/mo, and the dots disappear from the chicken image. (That's basically what the chicks with a Rhode Island Red mother will be.)

The top one of the dropdown gene boxes has E^Wh/E^Wh for a Speckled Sussex or a Rhode Island Red. To model chicks from a Black Copper Marans hen, change that box to E^R/E^Wh. That gets a bird that's split for Birchen and Wheaten, but it shows the BIrchen pattern because Birchen is dominant to Wheaten. The differences in those patterns are more obvious for females than for males.

To model chicks from a Barred Rock hen, change that same top box to E/E^Wh. That gives a chicken that is all black ("Extended Black" is the name of the gene), but carrying Wheaten. Sons also get B/b+ for white barring, while daughters have the calculator's default of b+/-

For the Cream Legbar-mix hens, they probably have one copy of the Cream gene. It's abbreviation is Di (for "dilute"). So they are probably Di/di+ and will give Di to some chicks (making them have cream or light gold/brown) and will give di+ to some other chicks (letting them show a darker red/brown color, because they do not have Cream diluting the color.)

Cream Legbars have e+/e+ wildtype at the top dropdown box, but I do not know what your crossed hens ended up with. It could still be e+/e+, or they might have E^Wh/e+ (which seems likely from your description), or maybe something else yet. So I'm not entirely sure how to model that part. From your description, I am pretty sure they do not have E (Extended Black) or E^R (Birchen).

Basic notes about the chicken calculator, that also apply to some other resources on chicken genetics:

Genes with + are the form found in the wild ancestors of chickens, and are the default settings of the calculator until you change it (setting a breed, or changing the individual boxes.) It is not really important to remember this. I have just been putting in the + so things will look the same in my typing as they do in the calculator.

Capital letters indicate dominant genes, lowercase letters indicate recessive genes. This is important, because often the same letter represents both the dominant and recessive genes, and the only difference is whether the letter is capitalized or not. Example: s+ is the recessive gene for gold, S is the dominant gene called Silver that changes gold to white.

Each dropdown box is one locus (place on the chromosome where a gene is located). Some have just two gene options, but some have quite a few choices (which means there have been several different mutations at that same place, although no individual chicken has more than two of them.)

Barring and a few others are on the Z sex chromosome. Roosters have ZZ, so they can have two barring genes, or two genes for not-barred, or one barred and one not-barred. Hens have ZW, so they can only have one barring gene or one gene for not-barred. Your Barred Rock hen will give barring to her sons (Z chromosome), but she gives a W chromosome to her daughters (makes them female, does not have a gene for barring or for not-barring.)

The calculator can figure offspring from a cross, but I mostly like to play with it by changing genes and watching the pictures change. That has helped me learn about the individual genes, but my main reason for "playing" that way is because I have fun doing it

 

[RisingPhoenixFarms]

Thankyou so much. You have been super helpful. I'll definitely check out the calculator now that i understand more how it works.