Some Questions About Egg Genetics in Chickens - Questions About Genetics (Ask questions!)

[RoostersAreAwesome]

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Beautiful!

 

[All4Eggz]

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Gorgeous! Interesting that the cock doesn’t have muffs or a beard.

How do muff/beard genetics work?

 

[NatJ]

Gorgeous! Interesting that the cock doesn’t have muffs or a beard.

How do muff/beard genetics work?

There is a dominant gene that causes muff & beard.

I don't know if two copies of the gene makes a fuller muff & beard or not.

I'm pretty sure there are some genes that can make the muff & beard more or less full, but I don't know any details about them. I just know they must exist, because some chickens have much bigger muffs & beards than others.

Since it is a dominant gene, and chicken with muffs/beard must have at least one parent with them as well. And chicken who has muffs/beard can produce some chicks that have it.

 

[All4Eggz]

There is a dominant gene that causes muff & beard.

I don't know if two copies of the gene makes a fuller muff & beard or not.

I'm pretty sure there are some genes that can make the muff & beard more or less full, but I don't know any details about them. I just know they must exist, because some chickens have much bigger muffs & beards than others.

Since it is a dominant gene, and chicken with muffs/beard must have at least one parent with them as well. And chicken who has muffs/beard can produce some chicks that have it.

Good information. Thanks.

I bred a Black Cochin roo with two EE hens… all 6 of the offspring have muffs and a beard.

 

[NatJ]

Good information. Thanks.

I bred a Black Cochin roo with two EE hens… all 6 of the offspring have muffs and a beard.

The hens are likely homozygous (pure) for the muff/beard gene, so they pass it on to every chick they produce.

The chicks are heterozygotes (splits). They have one copy of the muff/beard gene, and one copy of the not-muff/beard gene. If you take those chicks, and breed them to clean-faced mates, you will get about 50% chicks with muff & beard, and 50% clean-faced chicks.

With only 6 chicks from two hens, there is a chance that one or other of your hens is actually a heterozygote. If roughly half of her chicks should have clean faces, but she only produced 2 or 3 chicks, it's pretty easy to have a particular gene not show up. Such a hen could just as easily have produced 2 or 3 chicks that all have clean faces.

If you hatch more chicks from each hen, you will eventually know whether either hen carries the gene for not-muff/beard, because either you will get some clean faced chicks, or you will have so many muffed/bearded chicks that you know it's more than a coincidence.