Mystery Gene?

[The Moonshiner]

Lol
I know how you get when a chance to get all scientific comes up.
It bores me to death but glad it fascinates you. That makes it easier for me. Instead of reading I can just ask you.

 

[MasterOfAllChickens111]

It’s just that I have so many boys and I thought a hen would produce a female chick so her offspring could hatch chicks and keep the family going, but the same way goes to roosters too. I just want her to have a girl because every rooster will need to have a coop built for them and provide hens. After, this generation grows up and has children. Any boys after them will need to be sold. The girls would move in with the mothers/grandmothers.

 

[Fishkeeper]

Both male and female animals are needed to carry on the species. Both males and females can carry on the mother's genes. That's how nature works for all species that aren't parthenogenic (all self-cloning females), and as far as I'm aware, there are no parthenogenic species of birds.

If you hatch enough eggs, you should get females, but you're also going to get males.

You should look into bachelor coops, if you're really determined to keep all the roosters.

 

[nicalandia]

Both male and female animals are needed to carry on the species. Both males and females can carry on the mother's genes. That's how nature works for all species that aren't parthenogenic (all self-cloning females), and as far as I'm aware, there are no parthenogenic species of birds.

The Beltsville Small White turkeys have been bred specifically for Parthenogenesis and many documented males have been hatched(The komodo dragon can also produce male offsprings from parthenogenesis)

One of such documented cases of Male Turkey from Virgin Turkey hens
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13730880

 

[Fishkeeper]

That's really cool. I wonder if we can take that gene and get it into chickens? I mean, a lot of people would freak out about GMO chickens. But imagine it- you buy hatching eggs, every single one of them hatches into a hen, every egg they lay is auto-fertilized and you can hatch more hens. No extra roos, ever.

 

[nicalandia]

That's really cool. I wonder if we can take that gene and get it into chickens? I mean, a lot of people would freak out about GMO chickens. But imagine it- you buy hatching eggs, every single one of them hatches into a hen, every egg they lay is auto-fertilized and you can hatch more hens. No extra roos, ever.

Parthenogenesis has already been documented in chickens, but no embryos have hatched yet, it seems something prevents them from progressing from certain stage, but as with the turkey line this could also be bred for on chickens.

But as with other organisms with the ZW sex-determination system(With Komodo Dragons, Zebra Fish, giant river prawn) any Parthenogenic offsprings will be Male Only(Z/Z) because W/W gametes are unviable(in Z/W organisms males are Z/Z and females are Z/W, W/W are not viable)

I believe this to be a better approach than the female only parthenogenic lizards, because the production of parthenogenic breeding males will resume Darwinian natural selection that will result in adapted species(to the environment the hens arrived without males) instead of the female only clones that could be wiped out due to an illness they will not be able to adapt to.