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This video rounds off my series of videos about the genetics of colours and patterns, particularly in Wyandotte chickens. We started out with a basic introduction to genetics concepts and terminology, and we’ve worked our way through all the basic building blocks that we needed - the genes that make the blue colour, sex chromosomes, sex-linked genes and sex-linked crosses, and finally the genes that control the lacing pattern and the colours of the lacing and the ground colour of the Wyandotte’s feathers. So by the end of the last video, we had covered the theory of it all.
In this video I want to show you how I used all that information when breeding my own Wyandotte chickens, in particular my favourites, the white-laced buffs.
Here in New Zealand it is impossible for private individuals to import live chickens or fertile eggs, because of our very strict biosecurity laws that protect our native wildlife, so New Zealand chicken breeders are very restricted in what we have to work with. But Nine years ago (October 2010) I managed to get some fertile eggs of Wyandotte chickens carrying the dominant white gene. When they hatched, two were the white-laced buff colour I wanted. Unfortunately, both of them turned out to be boys. I called them Buffter and Buttercup.
I mated Buttercup with a silver-laced Wyandotte hen, and as predicted, I got colour-coded chicks from the sex-linked cross for the feather ground colour, plus the separate inheritance of the dominant white gene affecting the lacing colour.
I picked the best white-laced buff female and bred her with a buff-laced rooster. I got 9 with the white-laced buff colouring. Only one chick happened to not inherit the dominant white gene from either of his parents and so have black lacing. And three of them clearly had a double dose of the dominant white gene - very pale as chicks, and as adults they hardly even looked laced at all because they have almost no pheomelanin expressed. Since they had two copies of the dominant white gene as well as the genes for the lacing pattern they were excellent for breeding even though they didn’t look very pretty.
Unfortunately, one afternoon a vicious dog that was visiting our neighbor jumped the fence and slaughtered several of my chickens, completely wiping out all my years of work in breeding and improving the white laced Wyandottes. I hope that someone else in New Zealand has continued to breed Wyandottes with white lacing, who taught me so much about genetics. I hope you enjoy the whole series.
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