Preserving "lacing" in breeding

[Faerhii]

Hey guys! I want to pick the brains of some of you all.

I ordered eggs online through a supplier in AL and ultimately thanks to package handling I'm $250+ later and I have a single golden laced cochin chick. I'm working with USPS on the claim regarding handling issues, but that's neither here nor there..

So my genetics question. IF this chick ends up being a roo.. I had an odd thought to breed it to a blue egg breed for giant, laced cochin-cross easter eggers. But, which breed? I've been casually hatching eggs laid by my old silver laced wyandottes in the past and learned that just because one parent is laced doesn't mean the chick will be.. My SLW bred to my previously owned buff orpington roo yielded chicks without lacing.. Where as when I bred them to my black copper marans roo, I had some lacing in the copper areas on the bird.

My thoughts..

Readily available to me locally would be cream legbar, various colors of aracauna, and various colors of ameraucana. I do not want to use aracauna because they're smaller and I would really like to preserve the cochin size. I don't really want to use cream legbars because the sexlink on the legbars cancels gold. I don't know if they would pass it, but just in case I don't want to cancel gold on a chick bred from a gold laced cochin.. So that leaves me with various colors of ameraucana. Also.. Cheeks/beards. A total cuteness bonus.

I'm thinking not black, as that could just hide the lacing.. I'm leaning toward taking buff off the list as well because my last attempt with lacing and buff just removed the lacing.. Leaving me with white, blue, splash, or wheaten. Has anyone successfully bred lacing into a wheaten bird? A blue bird? That could look really cool depending on the outcome.

IF this chick is a rooster, I think I'll start my own little test breeding by penning him up with my salmon favorelle and see what happens with their wheaten color and go from there. I also have a buff orpington/black australorp cross I could toss in there to see how it reacts with the buff/black.. But for all I know there are different kinds of wheaten/buff/black genes and I'd just be wasting my time.

Blah. What do you all think? Anyone done something like this? I know I won't know for sure until I try it, and won't know if I even can try it for a while as the chick in question is less then a week old.. but I'm curious to see if anyone else has given it a go, or even just stumbled upon it with barnyard mixes..

If it's a hen, I'll probably give it a go with my black ameraucana roo just to see what it makes. I wouldn't necessarily be as open to buying random roosters just to play with the colors as I would be to adding more hens to my flock.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

@Overo Mare @The Moonshiner

 

[Thunder344]

@MysteryChicken might know something. Good luck!

 

[MysteryChicken]

Hey guys! I want to pick the brains of some of you all.

I ordered eggs online through a supplier in AL and ultimately thanks to package handling I'm $250+ later and I have a single golden laced cochin chick. I'm working with USPS on the claim regarding handling issues, but that's neither here nor there..

So my genetics question. IF this chick ends up being a roo.. I had an odd thought to breed it to a blue egg breed for giant, laced cochin-cross easter eggers. But, which breed? I've been casually hatching eggs laid by my old silver laced wyandottes in the past and learned that just because one parent is laced doesn't mean the chick will be.. My SLW bred to my previously owned buff orpington roo yielded chicks without lacing.. Where as when I bred them to my black copper marans roo, I had some lacing in the copper areas on the bird.

My thoughts..

Readily available to me locally would be cream legbar, various colors of aracauna, and various colors of ameraucana. I do not want to use aracauna because they're smaller and I would really like to preserve the cochin size. I don't really want to use cream legbars because the sexlink on the legbars cancels gold. I don't know if they would pass it, but just in case I don't want to cancel gold on a chick bred from a gold laced cochin.. So that leaves me with various colors of ameraucana. Also.. Cheeks/beards. A total cuteness bonus.

I'm thinking not black, as that could just hide the lacing.. I'm leaning toward taking buff off the list as well because my last attempt with lacing and buff just removed the lacing.. Leaving me with white, blue, splash, or wheaten. Has anyone successfully bred lacing into a wheaten bird? A blue bird? That could look really cool depending on the outcome.

IF this chick is a rooster, I think I'll start my own little test breeding by penning him up with my salmon favorelle and see what happens with their wheaten color and go from there. I also have a buff orpington/black australorp cross I could toss in there to see how it reacts with the buff/black.. But for all I know there are different kinds of wheaten/buff/black genes and I'd just be wasting my time.

Blah. What do you all think? Anyone done something like this? I know I won't know for sure until I try it, and won't know if I even can try it for a while as the chick in question is less then a week old.. but I'm curious to see if anyone else has given it a go, or even just stumbled upon it with barnyard mixes..

If it's a hen, I'll probably give it a go with my black ameraucana roo just to see what it makes. I wouldn't necessarily be as open to buying random roosters just to play with the colors as I would be to adding more hens to my flock.

I don't know a whole lot about lacing, but @Amer, might.

I did breed Penciling into a Wheaten Based bird by accident. She's silver Pencilled. Most likely on the wheaten, split for partridge gene. E^Wh/e^b.

She's a mix of Buff Orpington/Barred Rock X RIR.

 

[MysteryChicken]

@RoostersAreAwesome, @NatJ

 

[NatJ]

Crossing to a black bird should get you birds that are mostly black, probably with some gold leakage but not pretty lacing. Similar if you cross to a blue bird.

If you cross a Gold Laced Cochin to a Cream Legbar, you should get chicks with patterns of black & gold or black & brown on them, but they might not have actual lacing. The sons will also have white barring, the daughters not (Barring is the gene that allows Legbars to be autosexing. But in this cross, it would make one kind of sexlinks instead.)

As a general rule of thumb, lacing can be considered one arrangement of black and gold. So cross to a bird that also has both black and gold in some arrangement, if you want a chance of seeing lacing in the chicks. Variations include: laced chickens can have silver instead of the gold in the middle of the feathers, or the black lacing can be replaced by blue, chocolate, or white. And the "gold" can also be any shade of red, brown, or tan, depending on the exact genes the chicken ends up with.

 

[RoostersAreAwesome]

Hey guys! I want to pick the brains of some of you all.

I ordered eggs online through a supplier in AL and ultimately thanks to package handling I'm $250+ later and I have a single golden laced cochin chick. I'm working with USPS on the claim regarding handling issues, but that's neither here nor there..

So my genetics question. IF this chick ends up being a roo.. I had an odd thought to breed it to a blue egg breed for giant, laced cochin-cross easter eggers. But, which breed? I've been casually hatching eggs laid by my old silver laced wyandottes in the past and learned that just because one parent is laced doesn't mean the chick will be.. My SLW bred to my previously owned buff orpington roo yielded chicks without lacing.. Where as when I bred them to my black copper marans roo, I had some lacing in the copper areas on the bird.

My thoughts..

Readily available to me locally would be cream legbar, various colors of aracauna, and various colors of ameraucana. I do not want to use aracauna because they're smaller and I would really like to preserve the cochin size. I don't really want to use cream legbars because the sexlink on the legbars cancels gold. I don't know if they would pass it, but just in case I don't want to cancel gold on a chick bred from a gold laced cochin.. So that leaves me with various colors of ameraucana. Also.. Cheeks/beards. A total cuteness bonus.

I'm thinking not black, as that could just hide the lacing.. I'm leaning toward taking buff off the list as well because my last attempt with lacing and buff just removed the lacing.. Leaving me with white, blue, splash, or wheaten. Has anyone successfully bred lacing into a wheaten bird? A blue bird? That could look really cool depending on the outcome.

IF this chick is a rooster, I think I'll start my own little test breeding by penning him up with my salmon favorelle and see what happens with their wheaten color and go from there. I also have a buff orpington/black australorp cross I could toss in there to see how it reacts with the buff/black.. But for all I know there are different kinds of wheaten/buff/black genes and I'd just be wasting my time.

Blah. What do you all think? Anyone done something like this? I know I won't know for sure until I try it, and won't know if I even can try it for a while as the chick in question is less then a week old.. but I'm curious to see if anyone else has given it a go, or even just stumbled upon it with barnyard mixes..

If it's a hen, I'll probably give it a go with my black ameraucana roo just to see what it makes. I wouldn't necessarily be as open to buying random roosters just to play with the colors as I would be to adding more hens to my flock.

In some cases, you can get partial lacing in the first generation. In other cases, you can’t. It depends on the individual chicken’s genes and also what type of lacing it is (lacing on sebrights, for example, would be more dominant in offspring than lacing on cochins).

There’s a good chance you will get very little/very messy lacing in the first generation, or no lacing at all. In that case, you’re going to have to cross back to the cochin or cross two cochin mixes together. Doing that will give you laced or partially laced offspring with pretty much any mix.

I don’t know if white in ameraucanas is recessive or dominant. If it’s recessive, it will probably be black or wheaten underneath, so it will be the same as crossing to those colors. If it’s dominant, you would probably get mostly white chicks in the first generation, though you could breed them into white laced reds.

Blue and splash are just diluted black, so you’ll get the same results as crossing to black (except half or all of the chicks will have blue feathers instead of black feathers). You could breed towards blue laced (and splash laced) golds if you wanted to.

Not sure about wheaten. It’s less dominant than black, but I don’t know how it would interact with lacing. You should still be able to get lacing in a second generation cross with wheaten involved.

 

[Faerhii]

Thanks for the responses everyone! I'm sorry for slow reply.. For some reason I didn't see the notifications on this. I was really excited to try this whole experiment out, but for now it has been stalled.. The solo gold laced cochin chick in question failed to thrive.

 

[The Kooky Kiwi]

Hi There.

Here's a little info that might help you with your question about preserving lacing.

You may want to do some additional research because some breeds of chicken do not need ALL of the below genes in order to achieve lacing - but the general concept applies.

The single lace pattern is not one gene, but rather is the result of several genes acting together. In the case of Sebrights, the genetic "recipe" is as follows:

ER/ER (Birchen Base)
Co/Co (Two Columbian Gene copies)
Db/Db (Two Ginger Gene copies)
Pg/Pg (Two Pencilled/Laced Gene copies)
Ml/Ml (Two Melanised Gene copies)

Each gene above interacts with the other genes, and certain combinations are "required", to move the black around the feather in the desired way, and show color where desired.

If you conduct a breeding where the chicks receive some, but not all, of the above genes then you can get a variety of effects including pencilled, double laced, spangled, and all kinds of weird "partial" lacings.

Here's some examples of my project birds that started with a Single Laced Sebright bred to a non laced bird. Some of the gene combinations got broken - resulting in non laced babies.

Successive breeding has resulted in a "small" proportion of babies receiving enough of the required genes to form a lace - although the lacing was not as uniform as the original laced hen.


Rusty - Partial lacing & pencilling


Front two hens - double lacing
Back hen - single lacing with too much black & incorrect lacing on tail


Junior - single lacing with too much black & incorrect lacing on tail


Hen- Highly melanised, but some feathers show an incomplete single lace.

 

[Shell from Zim]

Hi There.

Here's a little info that might help you with your question about preserving lacing.

You may want to do some additional research because some breeds of chicken do not need ALL of the below genes in order to achieve lacing - but the general concept applies.

The single lace pattern is not one gene, but rather is the result of several genes acting together. In the case of Sebrights, the genetic "recipe" is as follows:

ER/ER (Birchen Base)
Co/Co (Two Columbian Gene copies)
Db/Db (Two Ginger Gene copies)
Pg/Pg (Two Pencilled/Laced Gene copies)
Ml/Ml (Two Melanised Gene copies)

Each gene above interacts with the other genes, and certain combinations are "required", to move the black around the feather in the desired way, and show color where desired.

If you conduct a breeding where the chicks receive some, but not all, of the above genes then you can get a variety of effects including pencilled, double laced, spangled, and all kinds of weird "partial" lacings.

Here's some examples of my project birds that started with a Single Laced Sebright bred to a non laced bird. Some of the gene combinations got broken - resulting in non laced babies.

Successive breeding has resulted in a "small" proportion of babies receiving enough of the required genes to form a lace - although the lacing was not as uniform as the original laced hen.


Rusty - Partial lacing & pencilling
View attachment 2822014

Front two hens - double lacing
Back hen - single lacing with too much black & incorrect lacing on tail
View attachment 2822016

Junior - single lacing with too much black & incorrect lacing on tail
View attachment 2822017

Hen- Highly melanised, but some feathers show an incomplete single lace.
View attachment 2822030

Interesting information and very cute birds
I have a little golden sebright pullet, and I'm hoping to get some lacing into my crested birds.. they are wheaten black/blue and self white so it could be a tall order lol Maybe I'll get white laced buff if I breed to white!?!‍♀ No idea what the mix with the wheatens would yield Still gonna give it a bash though