Hatchery Whiting True Blues

[fat brown hen]

I sent an email to the hatchery to see if I could interview dr whiting on the development of the true blue. I’ve read conflicting accounts of how they were made and would like to clear up the confusion.

I believe it's a secret, like the formula for coca-cola.

 

[TexasBlues]

You might be right. I would think that the genetic hackle lines are an industry secret.
I vaguely remember watching on of the videos of YouTube with dr whiting and he said something like we found that some of our chickens were producing blue eggs.

 

[Nomadicus]

All I know from what I've read about the development of the true blue is that the only things that mattered was the size of the egg, egg color, and general size of the birds. Color of the birds didn't mean anything to Dr. Whiting. I hope that he can be interviewed about what he was trying to do not any secrets or intellectual property that he now owns.

 

[NatJ]

@NatJ @TexasBlues @RedwoodCoastChick -- Are they consistently leghorn-shaped? ie, sleek, compact, but with pea combs.

Yes, they were approximately Leghorn-shaped (but with pea combs)

I'm not very good at recognizing chicken body shapes, so I wouldn't notice if they were a little off, but they were definitely not fluffy like an Orpington or round like a Cornish.

 

[fat brown hen]

All I know from what I've read about the development of the true blue is that the only things that mattered was the size of the egg, egg color, and general size of the birds. Color of the birds didn't mean anything to Dr. Whiting. I hope that he can be interviewed about what he was trying to do not any secrets or intellectual property that he now owns.

Seems odd that there would be so much color variation if the breeder was just trying to optimize for egg size/color. Other production breeds all look the same within the breed (eg white leghorns and ISA brown).

Just thinking out loud, but if I breed Whiting True Blues in my backyard, are they really Whiting True Blues? If no one knows what went into the breed, a backyard breeder might not select the same traits that Whiting would select. More like a WTB knockoff.

I feel the same way about Icelandic chickens -- the "breed" is defined by the fact that they are a landrace from Iceland. A breeder would have to recreate Icelandic conditions in their backyard in order to maintain the breed's strengths through natural selection. Popping a few Icelandics into a breeding pen is not quite the same thing.

 

[RedwoodCoastChick]

I think they’re fairly sleek looking in general. Here’s some examples from dragonfly farms. The same place I got my eggs from.
https://www.dragonflyfarmnc.com/whiting-true-blue

And here’s some photo galleries from other farms

https://silverhomestead.com/whiting/

https://www.sugar-feather.com/product/true-blue-chicken/

TexasBlues, thank you for the links! The photo galleries do show off how variable WTB coloring can be. They do all seem to have a fairly sleek body, not heavy girls like my Buff Orp, Barred Rock and Australorp.

WTB Martha's conformation is much like my 2 Eggers, and all 3 of those lighter-weight girls can really FLY - if not for the hawk net over our open run, they'd be over our 8 foot deer fence and out into the woods in a flash.

 

[NatJ]

Seems odd that there would be so much color variation if the breeder was just trying to optimize for egg size/color. Other production breeds all look the same within the breed (eg white leghorns and ISA brown).

It is not odd, it is perfectly normal.

White Leghorns look alike because people culled all the ones that didn't match.

ISA Browns all look alike because they are bred to be that way: they are color-sexable at hatch IF the parents are the correct colors. So the hatcheries are careful about only using correctly-colored ones.

For the Whiting True Blues, if someone originally had chickens of a variety of colors but they all laid blue eggs, then selecting for just blue egg production would not make the feather colors any more consistent. The chickens would still have a variety of feather colors. The same is true of the Easter Eggers sold by many hatcheries: they select for egg color & production, but do not care about feather color, and the chickens come in a wide variety of colors.

If you wanted pure colors of the Whiting True Blues, you would have to get a bunch of the chickens, sort them by color, and then keep breeding each single-color line for quite a few generations, always culling the off-color chicks. (Some genetics knowledge can make it go a bit faster, but the basic process is still the same, and it will still take at least a few generations to get any pens that breed true for any specific colors.)

 

[fat brown hen]

It is not odd, it is perfectly normal.

White Leghorns look alike because people culled all the ones that didn't match.

ISA Browns all look alike because they are bred to be that way: they are color-sexable at hatch IF the parents are the correct colors. So the hatcheries are careful about only using correctly-colored ones.

For the Whiting True Blues, if someone originally had chickens of a variety of colors but they all laid blue eggs, then selecting for just blue egg production would not make the feather colors any more consistent. The chickens would still have a variety of feather colors. The same is true of the Easter Eggers sold by many hatcheries: they select for egg color & production, but do not care about feather color, and the chickens come in a wide variety of colors.

If you wanted pure colors of the Whiting True Blues, you would have to get a bunch of the chickens, sort them by color, and then keep breeding each single-color line for quite a few generations, always culling the off-color chicks. (Some genetics knowledge can make it go a bit faster, but the basic process is still the same, and it will still take at least a few generations to get any pens that breed true for any specific colors.)

I must be doing something wrong. I started out with a colorful flock 10 years ago, but after many generations, all the chicks I hatch now are brown, black, or brownish black.

 

[TexasBlues]

I don’t really know much about color and pattern inheritance yet, but maybe the white of the leghorn is covering up other color/patterns. And when bred to the ameracauna it opened up those colors/patterns?

 

[NatJ]

I must be doing something wrong. I started out with a colorful flock 10 years ago, but after many generations, all the chicks I hatch now are brown, black, or brownish black.

If you only keep one or two roosters at a time, they have a very big effect on what color genes are in all the later generations. The hatcheries are probably working with a larger flock size, so this effect would be reduced. Reading about "genetic drift" might give a better explanation, if my way of putting it isn't helping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift (I know that reading explanations from different people is helpful to me if I have trouble understanding something.)

What other colors did you have, that disappeared? You may have lost a few dominant genes. Once a dominant gene is gone from your flock, it will never re-appear unless you re-introduce it. From your description, it sounds like you do not have Silver (a dominant gene that turns brown/red/gold into white) or Dominant White (turns black into white) or Blue (turns black into blue or splash), all of which were definitely present in some Whiting True Blues that I got from McMurray hatchery.