Ameraucana Breeders Club
The Official Forum of the Ameraucana Breeders Club => Ameraucana Marketplace => Topic started by: Guest on March 23, 2006, 09:23:00 AM
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Does this bird look to be black gold.
(http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y79/tadkerson/cc5abfc8.jpg)
Rooster
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She may be something to use toward making black gold, but I wouldn\'t use her because of the willow legs.
Below is the LF F1 pullet that I used this season. She is half buff and half brown red. I used a brown red cockerel over her. He was 1/2 bantam and had lacing all the way down his breast. I\'ve got a long way to go.
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I may have posted this before, but here is one of my F1 bantam black gold pullets. Greg has her now. I hatched a few dozen pullets and raised them up last year. Then I culled them down to the best three that I used to breed from this season. Once again we have a long way to go, if perfection is the goal, but I bred from the best I had available.
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In making black gold from \"scratch\" try to avoid females with salmon or near salmon colored breasts. That would usually indicate \"wild type\", or small e at the e locus. Black golds are birchen (E>R) at the e locus. The ultimate goal is to have a bird (female) that is laced and shafted on every feather, even the breast feathers. The lacing and shafting are superimposed over a black (or as near black as possible) background. Obviously salmon on the breast will prevent the proper color from being expressed.
Mike Gilbert
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The pullet in the picture is heterozygous birchen and ?. She hatched form a cross between a easter egger and a monique blue egger. I hatched out a bunch of eggs for a lady who wanted easter egger chicks. She had black muffs and beard so I kept her in order to see her adult color.
I am not working toward the black gold color.
In order have a quality bird the feather must be black with gold lacing. And each feather should have a gold shaft.
Is that correct?
Michael,
What was your source of birchen for your birds from the brown red variety ?
Rooster
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Brown red Ameraucana bantam.
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I have gotten brown red bantams from black crossed with *silver, but the bantam silvers still don\'t breed true and some still are *birchen instead of being pure for wild-type.
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John,
The chipmunk striped chicks are pure for wild type, as Birchen is dominant over \"e\" and any chick carrying the birchen gene would have chick down that is black or near black.
Mike
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any chick carrying the birchen gene would have chick down that is black
I am learning as I go. This may be the first year that all of the bantam silvers are hatching with the \"chipmunk\" look, so I have finally quit using birchen. In the past some hatched black and I raised them. Remember years ago I showed a very nice birchen cockerel that I thought was silver...until the finer points were pointed out (thanks). Well I figured the birchen males were close to silver males and bred from them hoping to breed in the missing white in the wing bay area. In short I was building on the wrong foundation (but that\'s another sermon). Year after year I thought I was so close to having some great silvers, but kept going backyards by crossing the birchens in with the silvers. Yes, I should have culled all the black chicks (hindsight is great).
It is possible that some of the *silvers that I used were actually E^R/e^+ and not pure silver. That may explain why I could get brown red and blue chicks when crossing them with blacks and whites.
Give me another 20 years and I might get it right. :thinking:
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John,
Where did the blue gene come from?
Rooster
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Where did the blue gene come from?
They came from my bantam silver (maybe silver/birchen) females crossed with bantam white males (I think...because I also used black males over them and think the black cross produced the brown reds). The blues generally feathered out with some silver in their hackles. Mike took home one of these \"blue\" pullets that was solid blue with great type from a show in Ohio a few years ago.
I have heard of people getting blues from black and white crosses, even though I know they should come from black/splash crosses.
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You will get blues from black / white crosses only if the white bird carries the dominant Bl gene that dilutes the black. The gene can\'t come from the black side of the mating, as the black would not be black if it carried the Bl gene. Some whites will carry the Bl gene and others don\'t. The only way practical way to tell, unless you know the parentage, is to test mate.
MikeG.
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It makes sense that the Bl gene is coming from the white birds, but seems odd to me that if the bird is heterozygous recessive white \"c\" and incompletely dominant blue \"Bl\" that the splash would show thru. It would also seem that breeding these white looking birds together would produce a % of pure splash birds and I don\'t remember getting any from my whites when I had them.
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John,
The recessive white and the dominant Bl are two completely different alleles. Here dominant Bl only means one copy dilutes black. It does not mean it negates recessive white in recessove white\'s pure form. Chickens can be pure (homozygous) for both.
In fact, if only one recessive white gene is present, the bird would likely not be white at all. Recessives have to be pure to be manifested. Recessive white in it\'s pure (homozygous) form can cover up all kinds of colors, some better than others. And it definitely covers up black and/or blue. I\'m not sure if \"covers up\" is a good term, as it prevents the formation of melanin pigment in the feathers.
Similarly, the sex-linked barring gene prevents dermal melanin from forming, which explains why barred chickens with this gene will never have slate leg color.
Mike
Mike
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The genetic term for the action of reccessive white on a bird of color would be epistatic. A person would say the recessive white genes are epistatic to the extended black gene. In this case the recessive white genes supress the expression of the extended black gene.
There is another way of stating the expression of genes. In chicken genetics there are diluters and enhancers. It could be said that the recessive white genes dilute the black pigment eumelanin to white the absence of color.
Another term used in genetics is the term hypostatic. The extended black gene would be hypostatic to the recessive white genes. The black pigment is hypostatic to the absence of color or white.
Or you could say it the way Mike said and say the white covers the black. Most people could understand the concept the way Mike presented it.
Rooster
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recessive white and the dominant Bl are two completely different alleles
That would explain it.
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The genetic term for the action of reccessive white on a bird of color would be epistatic.
That\'s right. Some of us ole farm boys have read the proper terminology but more often use the language we are familiar with. You will also see that I use \"pure\" more often than \"homozygous\". The Sellers website has many of the basic terms defined - http://marsa_sellers.tripod.com/geneticspages/page3.html
recessive white and the dominant Bl are two completely different alleles
I thought they were allelic genes under the \"Group 4 Genes\" on the Sellers site, but now see they are under the heading below that \"Other Autosomal Genes\". I have the website printed out and in a notebook for quick reference. The Other Autosomal Genes heading is printed at the bottom of a page and I didn\'t notice it.
Is they another site that groups these \"other\" genes or haven\'t they been mapped out yet?
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Howdy ya\'ll,
Not sure how I missed this discussion... genetics is my favorite topic, lol. I\'d like to point out a few things regarding \'Dominant white\', \'recessive white\' and \'blue\', as well as the structure of the Seller\'s site.
John, Lee set up the hierarchy as such that genes are grouped in to subclasses within their main grouping. In plain speak, Dominant white may be in with other genes within that general grouping, but it will be within it\'s own specific sub-group along with \"only\" the associated alternative alleles. Unless Lee has changed the structuring in the last year or so, the specific family groupings are all in the same box. So.... Dominant white \"I\", wild type \"i+\" (normal coloration), Smokey \"I^S\" and Dun \"I^d\", are all the documented allelic alternatives at \"this locus\". \"Bl\" blue may be within the same main grouping, but that doesn\'t mean it is found on the same spot on the chromosome or even that it\'s on the same chromosome. You can tell what is related to what by the \"tab field\" that each gene is listed in.
Regarding \"how\" each of these genes work, Dominant white AND the alternative alleles in it\'s family are very specific in their functionality, they are \'dilutors\'. Blue is also a dilutor. Recessive white on the other hand is an \"inhibitor\", which means that it actually stops the production of pigment all together. It helps to know where and when these genes work also. Both types of pigment are produced by melanocytes, which are highly specialized cells that come from the same nerve tissues that form the brain and spinal tissues. Very early in the embryo\'s development the melanoblasts break off from the lower (back) portion of the neural crest (pre-brain tissues) and \"travel\" throughout the body, depositing themselves in connective tissues such as the skin and the areas where feathers grow from. Once firmly rooted they become melanocytes which produce the pigment granules that we call \"color\". Inhibitor type genes \"stop\" the production of pigment in a unique way, as most of the melanoblasts don\'t survive long enough to become melanocytes, so they won\'t produce pigment at all. There can be negative effects of this as can be seen in recessive white cats (and many other recessive white animals). Some recessive white complications are deafness and in some cases blindness. Quite simply put, in some cases the genetic cause of recessive white is so strong in it\'s affects that melanoblasts die before implanting in the eyes or ears to become sight tissues or hearing tissues. In extreme cases there can be major brain function loss also associated.
Dilutors on the other hand work in an entirely different way, they work more like faucets regulating the flow or production of melanin (pigment granules) so that the final color is diluted. That being said, there are a few breeds and strains within breeds that are white \"because of\" the Bl blue gene. If you breed splashes to splashes you will \"technically\" get nothing but \"splashes\"......... but..... you can breed selectively towards a whiter and whiter flock. They wouldn\'t be any less white than whites made from the Dominant white gene, as both genes are considered to be \"incompletely dominant\". Which is why sometimes there a splotches of color \"bleeding through\" in white birds. It\'s not always caused by heterozygousity. As for the \"non-related\" genes that intensify or or negate the outward effects of another gene, otherwise called enhancers or in some cases negative trait causers, life doesn\'t take place in a vacuum. A perfect example of this resides in \"blue ameraucanas\", as no two blues look the same... some have narrow lacing, some have wide lacing and some are about right. Supporting genes have a LOT to do with the final product and cannot be ignored. I have at this time american pit fowl that posses the non-related genes powerful enough to completely cover up any traces of \"Bl\" blue. If a person didn\'t know what signs to look for, they would swear on a stack of bibles that the fowl were \"pitch black\". So......... don\'t judge a book by it\'s cover, as you have to meander through it\'s pages if you wish to understand the true meaning.
Which brings me to my last point...
In the past, poultry breeders who wanted a \"stay white\" breed of fowl quite honestly \"threw everything at the wall to see what stuck\", lol. In other words, they purposely bred dominant white, recessive white, blue, mottled, barring and anything else that stopped, slowed, diluted or \"got rid of\" color in order to make perfectly white birds that \"stayed that way\". Ironically, this is one of the main reasons why \"white fowl\" can be one of our greatest repositories for \"lost COLOR & PATTERN genes\" in the modern poultry world. If people only knew how great the potential of these fowl were, they\'d be grabbing up birds from old lines of \"white fowl\" and breeding them to colored fowl to see just \"what\" exactly they were hidding.
Regards,
Dan