#quail genetics

[kedreeva]

I love seeing your bird genetics posts on my dash, they make me so happy! Is there a mutation you are selecting for that you really want to talk about right now?

Well, the EV there just isn't a lot to talk about, even though I'm way more excited about that than anything because I've been dying to get my grubby little paws on that gene for years. But there's nothing particularly interesting about it, it's just my favorite. PLUS I'm not selecting for that until summer.

BUT THIS LITTLE THING JUST HATCHED.

First quail of the year. It is out of an SLB het roux celadon male over roux celadon hens.

my god it sounds simple when I put it like that but LISTENNN. This little shit is the product of going-on-five-years of work and efforts to combine six different lines from five different states, in order to produce (eventually) this bird's grandchildren.

My OG celadon line (originates from NC, USA. Advertised as Homozygous EB, carries WWP, Fee, Roux, true to advertisement) "CE" line

"SLB" jumbos (originates from WA, USA. Found to carry fee, WWP, Dotted White, and roux) "TOW" line

"Wild type" het roux (originates from WI, USA. found to be SLB het roux later) "FWT" line

"Wild type" celadons (originates from CA, USA. Looked to be a mix of wild type and SLB genes, all presumed SLB or SLB carriers for safety of the project) "EVR" line

Previous came packaged with celadon eggs from SLB EB, SLB fawn, and SLB sparkly birds (originates from CA, USA) "EVB" line

"Clean" wild type (Originates from TN, USA. Found to be carrying celadon, suspected to be carrying myrle). "TOF" line.

Excluding the three years it took me to develop my OG celadon line into something that wasn't garbage (from birds that were terrible quality to "okay" quality by type, from eggs that were practically unhatchable from being weird shaped, thin shelled, tiny, and poorly colored to eggs that are pretty consistently sized/shaped/colored), this project started 2 years ago, when I decided I wanted feather-sexable celadons, and then that I wanted truly wild color/pattern celadons. My OG line was not feather sexable AT ALL and it was taking me months to determine their sex and quality.

So, the first cross I did in 2024 was to cross my OG celadons to the FWT "wild type" het roux males I picked up in Wisconsin. I was initially excited about this acquisition, because I thought I'd be able to clean the line out with just these guys. TURNS OUT when I picked up the birds, I had my doubts about the veracity of that "wild type" claim, and after seeing actual wild types, I was right. So I moved forward anyway, and decided to make that branch of the project into roux birds. Roux and SLB can't coexist in homo/hemizygous form, because they're both sex linked, so if all the birds are roux, they definitely aren't and cannot carry SLB.

I used only homo EB hens that were roux, and no EB hens that had signs of fee. I selected the darkest/least white on them birds, in the hopes of avoiding the WWP genes. This pairing gave me F1: CEX.

CEX were het EB birds that were roux or SLB, and were all het CE for sure. Since it's easy to differentiate SLB from Roux, I sold all of the SLB birds, and bred the Roux het EB birds together. This produced a range of birds- All birds were roux. Roughly 25% were Homo EB, 50% het EB, 25% wild type pattern (called "pharaoh" pattern). I sold all of the homo/het EB birds. Of the wild patterns, 50% were males I sold off. Of the Roux pharaoh females left, only 25% of them would lay blue. I sat on a large group of these F2 CEX hen offspring until they laid, and sold any that laid a normal egg.

This gave me the roux celadon hens I used to produce the chick in the photo at the top of this post.

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The chick's father came from a different line.

His line started with one of the two EVR line roosters I saved (SLB pharaoh celadon). I crossed this rooster to the roux hens from above, to produce an SLB het roux celadon male ("ER" line), and crossed one of the resulting roosters back to the roux hens "RE" line), to produce this chick ("EE line, and hopefully one of the roux birds hatching over the next couple weeks is a male).

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Once I have a roux celadon male, I will be switching hens over to the EVX line hens- these are wild type celadon hens, produced from combining the EVB/EVR pharaoh celadon hens with a known wild type het celadon male. 50% of the hens from this cross are wild type AND lay blue, so I've been collecting them in a separate pen to await the final steps- crossing the EE line rooster to the EVX line hens tor produce a wild type het roux celadon male, which will be used over wild type CE hens again to produce a wild type celadon rooster. From there, I can create more WT celadon hens from basically any bird, because the males are the hard ones to get to be homozygous for sure.

It will, of course, take some test breeding to ensure that I have an actually clean wild type male (no roux) but I am looking forward to that part, too. Having a clean celadon line will be SO USEFUL to SO MANY PEOPLE who want to do projects but are afraid to lose the ce gene in a homozygous line.

once I have it, I also want to work on developing a homozygous ce/homozygous fee line, and a homo ce/het fawn line. I'm keeping my OG ce line around because once I have the rest sorted out, I do kind of want to work on a nice clean, no-white tibetan celadon. Something which consistently produces ONLY tibetan with no roux, fee, WWP, dotted white, NOTHING. And a tibetan line that doesn't have much, if any, white mismarkings on it. It was too stressful to have those be my ONLY quail, but I think if I had plenty of feather-sexable ones to deal with for sales purposes, having one line of incomprehensible beasts would be fine.

GENETICS IS FUN

[kedreeva]

Thoughts on the ginger coturnix quail morph? There’s a line I’m eyeing that’s celadon with roux, ginger, pansy and sparkly mixed possibilities as hatch eggs. (On fawn base I think?)

It's a sex linked recessive like roux. SLB roux, and ginger are alleles, and there's an order of dominance involved in phenotype expression (SLB > roux > ginger) meaning SLB and roux males can carry ginger silently. I don't deal with it personally so that's kinda where my knowledge ends. As far as I know, there are no genetic issues with ginger.

Celadon is the one that most people get wrong. There's a LOT of incorrect info being parroted about it.

It DOES NOT turn the eggs blue. It removes the outer coating of protoporphyrin (the dark spotting and base coat), revealing the color of the shell. But if you want nice blue eggs, you are gonna be working for them constantly. You CAN line breed to get all birds that lay nice blue, but it takes generations. What you get from a breeder won't likely be that- they will (hopefully) select the nicest blue ones to send, but that doesn't mean their line is throwing that color consistently. Celadons are the hardest ones to keep a nice line for, because you're selecting for everything you'd normally have to select for (health, temperament, type, size, color, etc) and adding in the egg factor.

You're gonna hear a lot of people talk about "bases" and your going to have to rewire your brain to understand what they're talking about is pattern. Patterns can appear in multiple colors. Pattern is how the color is displayed, the shapes of the color. Fawn is a pattern. Sparkly is a pattern. I'm pretty sure pansy is a pattern (I don't know much about pansy.... It could be a morph, which is a phenotype name not necessarily a gene name... There are also two kinds of pansy and I don't care enough about them to find out what the difference is for sure but I think one is a gene and one is a multi-gene morph... you might want to ask which it is before getting them, because there's a big difference between introducing one gene and introducing multiple genes together). There are pattern mutations and color mutations. A "base" when referring to phenotype isn't a thing. People are always talking about a color or a pattern when they say base.

This is a REALLY IMPORTANT thing to rewire your brain about. Because you're GOING to see people who don't know what they're talking about yammering about bases, and it's going to be REALLY CONFUSING compared to just calling it a fucking pattern, or talking about the genes themselves. "fawn base" is meaningless. Het fawn tells you the bird has one copy of fawn. Homo fawn tells you it has two copies. Understanding it's a pattern and not a color means you will understand it can come in other colors. Understanding it's a pattern and not a color means you will understand other patterns can interact with and change it. Knowing sparkly and fawn are both patterns makes it easier to understand that the sparkly pattern is changing the fawn pattern, but that the color is not affected. Understanding that fee is a COLOR not a PATTERN (and what the color DOES, which is reduce/eliminate most reds in the pattern, possibly yellows as well in homo form) will help you understand why a fawn bird:

turns into this when fee is added:

That's still a fawn pattern, and you can see the similarity. But it has no reds because the fee eliminates them. It's not a "base" it's just a pattern.

Patterns can also interact and co-express!

here's the fawn pattern interacting with the sparkly pattern:

That's not "sparkly on a fawn base" it's just a co-expression of two different patterns.

It seems pretty obvious in these two examples, because they all LOOK like fawn. Describing it as a "base" might seem to make sense looking at those two examples. Describing it as a base makes way less sense when you know this is also fawn (I think):

Now you're up shit creek without a paddle, because what the fuck is that, it doesn't look at all like the other fawns. But understanding that this is homozygous sparkly fawn, and understanding that both are patterns and that this is what sparkly does, will help you parse what's going on when you look at the birds. This is also sparkly, but not fawn, and also isn't EB:

This is EB!

And while there's enough of a difference to be able to tell, talking about fawn as a "base" like it's a foundation is. kind of meaningless in the end. It's actually SO meaningless a term that you're ALSO going to hear things like "fawn enhanced." Which is another (imo stupid) phrase that shouldn't exist, that just means the bird also has signs of having fawn genes. EB can be "fawn enhanced" and it is the most pretentious way of saying the bird also has fawn genes.

I don't bother trying to argue with anyone in the quail groups about their language use. But it's needlessly confusing, imo, and understanding why is important to actually understanding what's going on compared to trying to memorize practical knowledge.

[kedreeva]

Re:chromosome crossovers: Earlier this month I got my hands on a fancy guppy genetics book; to my great astonishment, their sex chromosomes not only DO crossover, but OFTEN ENOUGH breeders have estimates on the relative distance between certain genes and the sex determination region!!!

amazing!

The only ones we know have crossed over in peafowl is purple and cameo, and tbh... I'm not 100% sold on this being the case except MAYBE on the one brad had. In that case, the hen was purple and produced purple, cameo, WT, and peach. So definitely hinky stuff going on there, but given that purple and cameo are both sex linked.... something hinky had to be going on with the males too. And Brad has just enough practical genetics knowledge to skate by on producing stuff and telling you WHAT happens, but not enough to be able to talk about why it happens. So it wouldn't be beyond the pale to think that he didn't really understand what he was looking at, but knew enough to produce more of it anyway. Looking back, we can guess that either cameo or purple are probably near a snipping point for meiosis, but considering it's only happened (relatively "for sure") once, I don't think it's super close. There's just not enough documentation and careful tracking of what is going on with Peach to know more.... peafowl people SUCK at record keeping.

The "second" time peach appeared, it appeared in a fully cameo flock. Which, considering the gene on the purple locus has mutated twice already (purple and EV), there's a pretty good chance that purple is some really simple dilute that just.... mutated again, and happened to be in a cameo flock. Obviously I can't prove it, but I would be curious to know how many "oh he's split purple!" instances are actually fresh mutations vs a random blue bird carrying purple. I'm not saying it's super common, but I would be interested.

But it's interesting to know that there are species where crossover for mutations is more common! I suppose it makes sense, given just HOW MANY mutations there are for guppies... I thought for a hot second I wanted to get into them, but aquaculture is... expensive. And the sheer number of genes involved was dizzying to try to keep track of. Like, mice have a lot, and sometimes that gets a little much. Chickens also have a lot. Peafowl don't. Quail don't really.

That's it. This is a graphic from Thieving Otter Farm, detailing all of the quail mutations. Colors, patterns, and egg mutations included, which ones are alleles and which ones are not, and what they do. Since quail are also research animals we even know what locus and gene they actually are. You could memorize this on a random tuesday. it's so easy.

And you'll notice. Five sex linked genes. Three are alleles of each other, the other two are alleles of each other. I've seen maybe 2-3 albinos in 2 years of watching the groups. I've seen a handful of ginger, and MAYBE a few cinnamon, but largely you'll be dealing with just SLB or Roux for SL genes. And they're alleles so it's pretty straightforward.

Guppies have got so much more sex linked nonsense, it sounds like!

[kedreeva]

You mentioned you band birds by year, but how do you keep track of individuals for your genetics projects? Like if you're trying to figure out if a bird has such and such gene and hatch a bunch of their offspring to prove out their genetics, how do you track it all with so many birds!

The birds are in harems (one male, multiple females) for breeding (they kind of have to be because the males will overbreed hens if there aren't enough), so the only real way to track and individual hen's offspring would be to single-house her for a few days and mark her eggs and separate her eggs into hatching bags and band her offspring separately. You can also pretty easily AI quail by putting on some gloves and expressing sperm foam from a male and gently putting it on/in the hen's vent by putting it against her open vent (when you handle them and tip them up, they tend to eliminate waste and then the vent is open, and if you just put the foam against it, it gets kinda sucked up in there). So you could keep her fertilized as long as you need.

But generally you can test a group at once... IF you find the offspring produce what you want, THEN you can try testing, or just keep what you want. If what you want isn't visual (like you want to test a CE male, or if you had one het over wild types and wanted to test the hens for carrying or not, you CAN do testing like the above. It's just a pain in the ass, so you generally don't want to have to do it unless you have to.

Luckily, I don't have to do all of that for what I'm doing! My breeders are separated into pens according to their (known) genes, so when I collect eggs from a pen, I mark them, and separate the pen's eggs into hatching bags. I know the genetics of the parents (or have a very good idea about them), so I know what the babies should look like, and what they should carry, and I can look at the offspring to see if the parent cage is carrying something I don't want.

When it comes to judging a hen's eggs, I have a rack with 15 individual spaces that I can solo house hens in. I let them lay for a week and look at the quality. New layers can't get fully assessed for all stuff, because pullet eggs are always kind of weird, but I DO try to pick birds who lay better eggs as pullets, too. So I do some single-housing.

[kedreeva]

I dream to one day have quail and would love to breed white birds with bluish gray markings. I’m not entirely positive the traits I need, tho I’m pretty sure I’ll need fee but lord knows I’m excited to one day learn

I think you could do grey markings with fee, but there IS a blue mutation! As well, silver and andalusian make greyish birds. I THINK that EB + fee + blue or maybe it's just EB + blue makes a really killer combo, and if you add a good WWP to the mix, or splash (I haven't worked with splash) you'd get white markings without turning the whole bird white (dotted white would mean just one colored head stamp, not as good imo).

[kedreeva]

So, i know you're the go to expert on peafowl. But is there a go to expert on quail? Do people look into quail genetics or is this another case of it being a rather neglected subject?

So. Yes and no. There ARE actual, scientific, quail geneticists. Quail are used in research, and their gene mutations are actually mapped! We know which chromosome and upon which locus the genes reside, the genes have scientific names, and we know what processes they affect in the body.

There are also a lot of laypeople claiming to be experts, that still say things like "pharaoh base" and "fawn enhanced" which is tech bro language for genetics. Unfortunately, these are the people largely accessible by most people, and is where most people are getting their genetics knowledge about quail. Translating from these people is a headache, but possible if you learn some about actual genetics first. When pressed, some of them even know the actual genetics, and may think they're making things easier by trying to "dumb it down" for the masses, but honestly all that does is make it more difficult to learn, because people then become reliant on those people for info, rather than being able to take the correct language out and learn for themselves on the side.

So yes! there are actual real experts! no they are not generally interacting on social media. yes some of the ~influencers~ know what they're talking about and choose not to influence things in that direction and so no, I have not found any of them that I actually like enough to recommend them. The closest I could come to that is Bre Patz of Pips n' Chicks, who has a section of her website dedicated to quail genetics. she is not a web designer, and it's difficult to find the updated info because her site is split into "the old site with outdated/minimal info" and "the new site with good info that cannot be navigated because she quit halfway through making it??? or something??"

So that's fun!!

[kedreeva]

Question! From my understanding, genetic linkage is the tendency for genes to be inherited together because they’re physically close on the same chromosome. Is that something that shows up with the species you work with?

Depends! As far as colors and patterns are concerned, there's no known "linkage" in the mutations for peafowl (I don't believe there is "linkage" in colors or patterns for mice or quail, either, but I am less sure). Even though "peach" in peafowl is an inseparable purple + cameo combination, having cameo doesn't make a bird more likely to have purple also, and vice versa.

There ARE some linked health issues with some colors, but for peafowl it hasn't been proven to be "linked" or "because of" the gene. Which means, if a bird has gene A they are likely to also have gene B then that's two separate genes experiencing being on the same chromosome vs a bird that has gene A and gene A changes the color but that change in color is a side effect from Gene A's actual function. A good example of this is "progressive pied" in peafowl (NOT actually progressive pied but that's what it got called) is actually vitiligo in the USA. The spread of white is the result of dying pigment cells from the condition's autoimmune effects, the two aren't separate things. When you see progressive pied, you see autoimmune issues and other health issues. With charcoal, you see sterile hens and shorter lifespans, but no one knows for sure why. AY is a lethal homozygous gene and het AY mice tend to be overweight and prone to cancer, but I can't remember if that's a link or because of effect. Silver/Andalusian quail tend to be smaller/not grow as big (but I don't know why because I just avoid the color). Albino quail do poorly but I can't remember why. Manx mice have physical problems resulting from the bone loss in their hips from missing tails. I'm sure there's other stuff I'm forgetting but that's off the top of my head.

[kedreeva]

Everything I’ve seen so far seems to dilute the black to fully white in homo form. At least in quail. The homo sparkly fee birds I’ve see are black and white and it’s so pretty to me

You can also get that with pearl fee! Which is a more sparse pattern but same idea, black and white.