Silkie chick coloring seems wrong

[Smileybans]

This baby’s parents were supposed to be these two.

Snuggle the showgirl and Baby the satin. They have been together with no other hens or roos for about six months. I just recently introduced a hen that lays soft eggs a couple weeks ago but Baby had already been sitting on her eggs then.

My question is how could I have gotten that coloring and how could the chick look like this? It looks like it has a straight comb too. Did I just mix up her eggs with someone’s from outside?

 

[NatJ]

My question is how could I have gotten that coloring and how could the chick look like this? It looks like it has a straight comb too. Did I just mix up her eggs with someone’s from outside?

Silkies are supposed to have a comb that looks like a walnut, which usually involves both the rose comb gene and the pea comb gene. Single comb is genetically not-rose and not-pea, and is recessive. So the parents could be carrying the genes to produce a single comb chick, even though they do not show those genes. (The chick's comb looks like pea to me, but I know it's easy to be wrong when looking at a picture of a young chick. Pea would just require both parents to carry the not-rose gene.)


For the color, my short answer is:
Dominant and recessive genes can do funny things sometimes.

Longer answer for how I think the genetics worked to get this result:
I think the Satin is Paint. That is a chicken with the genes for all-black feathers, and one copy of the gene for Dominant White. Dominant White changes black to white, but when the chicken only has one copy of the gene, it lets some black bits show through.

The Satin would have passed the genes for all-black to this chick, but not the gene for Dominant White.

The Silkie looks white, but white silkies often have a gene called recessive white. When the chicken has two copies of that gene, it looks white, no matter what other genes it has that would normally affect color. But a chicken with only one copy of the recessive white gene will not look white. So when the chick got one copy of the recessive white gene from the Silkie, it did not get that gene from the Satin. This means it is not white, and instead it can show other colors (like lots of black.)

 

[Smileybans]

Silkies are supposed to have a comb that looks like a walnut, which usually involves both the rose comb gene and the pea comb gene. Single comb is genetically not-rose and not-pea, and is recessive. So the parents could be carrying the genes to produce a single comb chick, even though they do not show those genes. (The chick's comb looks like pea to me, but I know it's easy to be wrong when looking at a picture of a young chick. Pea would just require both parents to carry the not-rose gene.)


For the color, my short answer is:
Dominant and recessive genes can do funny things sometimes.

Longer answer for how I think the genetics worked to get this result:
I think the Satin is Paint. That is a chicken with the genes for all-black feathers, and one copy of the gene for Dominant White. Dominant White changes black to white, but when the chicken only has one copy of the gene, it lets some black bits show through.

The Satin would have passed the genes for all-black to this chick, but not the gene for Dominant White.

The Silkie looks white, but white silkies often have a gene called recessive white. When the chicken has two copies of that gene, it looks white, no matter what other genes it has that would normally affect color. But a chicken with only one copy of the recessive white gene will not look white. So when the chick got one copy of the recessive white gene from the Silkie, it did not get that gene from the Satin. This means it is not white, and instead it can show other colors (like lots of black.)

Thank you for explaining all of that. I can try and get a better picture of the comb in the morning. I stuck the chick under Baby, the Satin, tonight and forgot to take a picture. Baby is a paint. This chick and another egg were in the incubator because Baby kept pushing eggs out of the nest box. These two were still viable so I incubated them myself to put under her. The other one should be hatched out in the morning. This chick also has patches of white on its skin. Would that come from Baby?

 

[NatJ]

This chick also has patches of white on its skin. Would that come from Baby?

Sorry, I don't know about patches of color on the skin.