Spot’s Coturnix quail colour experiments

[SpotTheCat]

Where I got my information

Lost of different genes
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jpsa/45/3/45_3_159/_pdf/-char/en

Fawn 2/Italian/golden
https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article/87/3/248/908629

Roux, Lavender and beige
https://www.researchgate.net/public..._Mutations_on_Plumage_Color_of_Japanese_Quail

Silver/blue
https://www.researchgate.net/public...ts_and_homology_with_the_blue_chicken_plumage

Lavender and recessive white
https://www.researchgate.net/public...white_With_Chicken_and_Japanese_Quail_Hybrids
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579119553044

pansy
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jpsa1964/24/6/24_6_327/_article/-char/en

Redhead (not everyone can access all of it, but the abstract is still interesting)
https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article-abstract/70/6/413/774513?redirectedFrom=fulltext

 

[Tre3hugger]

 

[FloorCandy]

Lethal white (I think called SCC also) not 100% sure if that is what they are
batch 2, bought from ebay
Chick 1
View attachment 2740874
2
View attachment 2740875
3
View attachment 2740876

The SSC lethal whites will be 100% yellow at hatch and will grow up white with no color at all. They usually feather more slowly and are smaller. Females have more long term issues in my experience. If these came from eggs sold as containing lethal whites, they probably are mating silver to silver, so only 25% would be lethal whites, just like Merle in dogs. 50% would be silver, and 25% will be undiluted (no silver). It’s hard to tell if they have no silver in many cases because silver can be so dark gray it looks black when the black is just an accent.

I’ve been slowly curating some double silvers I hatched originally from Myshire eggs, and finding one who isn’t bug eyed and doesn’t have issues goes a long way to developing a healthy group of them. I think I had a rooster in the henhouse with some silvers I moved from the grow out, and I got some bug eyed weirdos, but my healthy male throws generally healthy double silver chicks, they are definitely smaller in general and much more sensitive, so harder to raise the first week or so, keeping them alive is a learning curve, but they are noticeably lighter meat and far less gamey so I’d like a healthy group for meat birds.

 

[FloorCandy]

Maybe what I think is silver is not what people now call silver. I will have a look and see if I can find the add

The schofield silver collection SSC is what most people call silver, but there are other types of gray, such as blue (Blau) and lavender. SSC is incompletely dominant and lavender is recessive. The other types don’t have any lethal aspect that I know of, but SSC is considered lethal or detrimental in double form, so one copy makes silver (gray) and 2 copies is lethal white.

Most of the grays cannot be distinguished from other types of gray/silver, especially when mixed with other colors and patterns. However, If you mix to a non gray, that youre certain has no gray in it at all, and you get some grays, you probably have SSC.

 

[FloorCandy]

Do you have a picture of the orange male? It sounds very interesting

Here’s my boy Apollo, he has eyes so light blue, they often have a red hue:

I have a hen from the same hatch that’s very similar, but tuxedo.

Not sure if you can tell from comparison with my hand, but he’s 9 weeks old and half the size of the hens he hatched with, and about 25-30% smaller than the other males the same age.

 

[FloorCandy]

It seems to be dominant. I have pictures of the adults, but the camera the pictures or on has decided not to let me get them off at the moment. The one adult who is chick 3 started grey with sandy yellow stripes and now has turn in to a grey, yellow and orange sort of marbled look. Chick I think 1 maybe 2 is white with a sandy yellow edge to the feathers and a bit of grey on his head he got darker as he has aged. Chick probably 2 was a sandy yellow he was culled so I don’t know what he’s colours would have changed to

Those all seem normal if they have SSC (Silver), which is incompletely dominant. If you can find the original eBay ad for the eggs I’d be curious to read the description.

 

[FloorCandy]

weird chocolate coloured one, from a Tibetan and a Range carrying Roux. Siblings are a all most solid redish orange I will post pictures of them when I find some. I think the siblings are Roux Range and this one was Roux Tibetan. Unfortunately it had to be culled because its feet were wonky
View attachment 2740877
View attachment 2740878

I had one like that, it ended up being as red as the others as an adult, it just had no lacing or pencilling. I called it cocoa, and it ended up a lovely smooth scarlet.

 

[FloorCandy]

Lethal white is the name of th gene, not the homozygous version of something. Pretty sure it is not the silver gene. I can’t remember what they where labled as differently not as Lethal white or Silver

Recessive white?

 

[FloorCandy]

I think the confuse come from that blue used to be called silver, the link at the top of my list calls SSC/silver, lethal white as far as I can understand

That article is very interesting, but a bit vague. It’s also 13 years old, and much has changed. I believe, based on context that they are giving SSC the designation of W. With one copy being what we call silver and 2 copies being white.

Have you checked out southwest gamebirds genetics pages? They’re a work in progress, but I find they are very informative. However, just like lethal gold was determined to be a separate mutation from fawn, that occurs at the same locus I believe, a lot of what we have now are combinations of mutations. I’ve been finding that with double silvers, the bad effects must occur separately to the silver color mutation because with careful breeding of double silvers, I get healthy chicks, and accidental, boy in the henhouse incidents still produce more sickly chicks.

we also need to remember these are lab mutations, but people were keeping and breeding quail long before you could use the internet to read about this stuff. In the Coturnix corner interview with Perry Schofield, he talks about how back like in the 60s I believe, it was common to find many mutations that we don’t see today, and people, even scientists say don’t exist, like albinos, and heterochromia. People bred what they liked, and the mutations that were more popular, spread, and others fizzled out.

 

[FloorCandy]

No I have not I will go check it out. I found something which mentioned a red egg gene, I would love to be able to get red eggs from my quails, sad it is not around anymore (at least as far as I know)

I read an old scientific article where they found red layers, but I’ve never seen any other mention of them that was legit. There’s a real shady operation claiming to have red and coal layers, but when requested they sent no images of red layers, and the coal layer photos they sent me were black and white and looked like celadons photoshopped in grayscale.