Yoda, I am going to have to do some looking around. I don't know what split silverpied means. Obviously, we have some stuff to get straight with regards to silverpieds. Gonna have to search through the old Deerman threads.
Got a little trip planned for this weekend though so I might just learn some new stuff.
It gets confusing again because the terminology is muddied. What is a Silver Pied pea, appearance-wise? From what I've gathered, it's a mostly white pea, males have white-centered ocelli (well, any that aren't already white from the pied parkings), and there's a dusty or "silver" appearance on the saddle. OK, so what genes go into that? It seems agreed that to start, the birds must be Pied. OK, what makes Pied? That answer is one copy of the Pied mutation, and one copy of the White mutation. OK, now the white ocelli -- that's the White Eye mutation. Does the bird need one or two copies? That's the tricky part. One hypothesis is that the bird needs two copies, and that the dusty or "silver" appearance is due to a separate gene. Others say that there's an allele (or "other version") of the White Eye mutation that gives the dusty or "silver" appearance. So if there's a separate "silver" mutation, then the bird needs two copies of White Eye. If "silver" is a form of the White Eye mutation, then the bird needs either one copy of "regular" White Eye and one copy of "silver" White Eye, OR simply two copies of "silver" White Eye.
So when people say "split to Silver Pied" what do they mean? I think we all can agree that Silver Pied requires multiple mutations to come together to produce the phenotype. So saying "split to Silver Pied" is a very unclear statement. Do you mean split to Pied? Or split to White? Or Single-Factor White Eye? Or the mysterious "silver" mutation? Remember that a bird CAN'T be split to Pied AND White but show neither -- they are alleles, which means the total number of copies of Pied, White and Normal can't be more than 2. OK, so what about Single-Factor White Eye -- is that what the "split to Silver Pied" birds are? Or are we going back to having one copy of the "silver" mutation (whatever it is)?
When you say a pea is "split to" something, it means that if bred to a bird visual for the "something", you should get 50% of the "something". But since Silver Pied is based on Pied (which is a heterozygote for the Pied and White mutations), then that's not possible, and the "split to Silver Pied" term has no solid meaning. If you want to understand it better, do something akin to what was done with Oaten -- rather than giving a new name for a two-mutation phenotype, call it what it is based on its parts (i.e. Cameo Blackshoulder).
And that's a good example of why they should be named that way. Try this: IB split to Oaten male X Oaten female. What do you have to do to figure it out? You have to translate "Oaten" to "Cameo Blackshoulder" and then realize that there are two separate mutations inherited independently. So you won't get just IB and Oatens, as would be implied from the first terminology. You'd get:
IB split to Blackshoulder daughters
IB split to Cameo and Blackshoulder sons
IB Blackshoulder daughters
IB Blackshoulder split to Cameo sons
Cameo split to Blackshoulder daughters
Cameo split to Blackshoulder sons
Cameo Blackshoulder (i.e. Oaten) daughters
Cameo Blackshoulder (i.e. Oaten) sons.
Now...would that make any non-Oaten offspring thus "split to Oaten"? Look at all the genotypes of the non-Oaten offspring -- the term "split to Oaten" would have no concise definition. It's the same logic behind "split to Silver Pied". No wonder there's confusion.
