please tell me the genetics of recessive genes (specifically wry tail)

[poltroon]

Adding to the punnet square, you have a 50% chance of breeding carriers and a 25% chance of breeding birds completely free of the gene. It is difficult to completely remove a recessive gene.

I don't know enough about wry tails to know if you can detect carriers without a test breeding.

If you repeat this cross, you will most likely be dealing with the wry tail more in the future. Whether or not you want to deal with that is a decision you'll need to make. But, one strategy would be to try for another male from this cross, and determine whether or not you got the elusive 25% that is free of the trait by breeding him to a known carrier. You'd end up with a whole batch of birds that you wouldn't want to use for breeding, because they'd be at least 50% carriers. But, if you got any wry tails in the batch (you'd expect 25% in a large enough sample, if he's a carrier), you'd know your new male was a carrier.

For that reason, if you're looking to eliminate carriers, he might be useful for test breedings to find the carrier females: his babies would all be carriers, and carriers bred to him would produce 50% wry tails.

If you have enough pens to work with, and you don't mind having a lot of meat birds, you can find and eliminate the carriers, and create a line of non-carriers.

 

[popcornpuppy]

Thanks for the replies so far. This is the exact type of info that I was looking for. I am not objectionable to culling and I plan to set up more breeding pens in the spring. Right now I have 2 pens that do duble duty as breeding/brooding pens. I know I need more.

I think I will probably cull the female as I am finding it harder to find a quality replacement male. The female is also a sister to the male and I know these things show up in that type of mating. I also have a second non-related line that I need to selectively breed into the other line where the wry tail showed up. I am still working on my second generation and hope to learn a whole lot more in the process. It's just the genetics lingo throws me off sometimes. I have a very basic knowledge of how these things work, but I still have a lot of learning to do