Sex linked ducks?

[Floof]

Golden Cascade is a rare breed, but from what I see online, your drake should be heterozygous for the chocolate allele, meaning that you can't use him to make sex-linked ducklings. You can't have two sex-linked generations in a row.

Let me make it clearer with breeds that I am more familiar with. Let's say that you have a khaki campbell drake (homozygous for chocolate) and you mate him with a black runner duck. The drake will give one chocolate allele to each of his sons and daughters. The duck will give a non-chocolate allele to her sons, and neither to her daughters. Since the male ducklings have one chocolate and one non-chocolate allele, they are not chocolate (because chocolate is recessive), they will be black like their mother. Since the female ducklings have one chocolate and nothing else, they are chocolate.

Now we take one of the male ducklings and use him as a drake in the next generation. This black drake carries chocolate, but since he is heterozygous we can't be sure what he is passing to his offspring. He mates with a black runner. To his sons and daughters he passes chocolate or non-chocolate. The black runner duck passes non-chocolate to her sons and nothing to her daughters.

The result is that 50% of the offspring are black drakes, 25% are black ducks, and 25% are chocolate ducks. I guess that you could consider that sex-linked, but if you cull all of the black ducklings then you only get half as many females as you would by doing it the proper way.

If you want to be able to use your pekins to make sex-linked ducks you need to figure out where they stand on the chocolate gene. You can use any drakes that are homozygous for chocolate (unlikely to find any I think) and any ducks that aren't chocolate.

To test your pekin ducks, mate them to your golden harlequin drake. This is very likely to produced sex-linked ducklings which you could confirm when they start quacking.

To test your pekin drakes, mate them with your appleyards. Any brown (instead of black) on the ducklings and you have a drake that can produce sex-linked ducklings. This is very unlikely, and I wouldn't bother trying.

Holderreads got back to me about the golden cascades and I thought it might be worth sharing:

Golden Cascade (Back again after a long absence) Cascades are an elite all-around duck for the backyard or farm flock. They are calm, excellent layers, fine medium-sized meat birds (6-8 pounds live weight), good foragers and adaptable to hot and cold climates. During the short day-light of winter, they have out-laid most other breeds.
The idea for the Golden Cascade came to us in the late 1970s. We received encouraging reports from agriculture development workers around the world describing how well ducks thrived and produced in their projects to help impoverished people have better diets and economic stability. These agriculturists commented that it would be helpful if there was a breed that could be used as a purebred, or alternatively, mated to the local indigenous ducks to produce offspring with improved production traits and whose gender could be identified easily at hatching time. We embarked upon a breeding program in 1979 to produce a multi-purpose duck with high egg production, efficient meat production, calm disposition, excellent foraging ability, and a unique plumage color genotype that would yield hatchlings that would be color-coded by gender when drakes from the new breed were mated to females of virtually any other breed.
In 1984 we introduced the Golden Cascade and they performed splendidly. Millie named them for the color of the day-olds and the dominant mountain range in Oregon. Ducklings have the typical mallard pattern, but the colors are fawn-buff or brown with golden highlights. At maturity, males have the mallard pattern, but with brownish heads with more-or-less satin green sheen, white neck ring, chestnut chest and cream underbody. Females are golden fawn, with most feathers penciled or center-marked with dark fawn and have pale cream facial stripes. Wing speculums in both sexes are satin-green or bronze. They are fast-growing and superb layers, capable of producing 240 to 325 premium quality eggs per year.

 

[TomCahalan]

Well then, that sounds ideal for breeding sex-linked ducklings. It sounds like they are chocolate mallard or something similar. I thought that it was just another name for the Golden 300, which is a breed with several names.

 

[Floof]

Well then, that sounds ideal for breeding sex-linked ducklings. It sounds like they are chocolate mallard or something similar. I thought that it was just another name for the Golden 300, which is a breed with several names.

So far they have been delightful so I'm glad to know that I have another excuse to keep them.