Hello. Geneteics question here.

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Taylor12777

In the Brooder
Sep 24, 2024
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I recently decided to breed my Silver Laced Wyandotte Rooster and my Splash silkie hen. I collected 6 eggs (after about 2 weeks of them being together and checking the eggs for fertilization percentage) and put them in the incubator to hatch. I'm hoping to get some sort of a laced fluffy chick, but the more I read, the more I realized that I know nothing about how genes work. Can someone explain the possibilities I've gotten myself into ? Has anyone done this cross before ? Below is a photo of my roo, Morgan and my silkie hen , Storm. All 6 of their eggs are growing perfectly. We are on day 14 of incubation now and they're all moving a ton and appear to be right on track developmentally. Also, what size can i expect the chicks to be when they're full grown ? Will they be smaller like my silkie, big like my roo, or somewhere inbetween? Is there a specific gene factor here that determines that or can they all be different? I really like the silver chickens if you havent gathered that yet. I do have some silver laced wyandotte pullets as well, but they arent laying yet. They're absolutely gorgeous though.
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Hiya, and welcome to BYC! :frow

I have enough trouble understanding my silkies and what colors to put together to make whatever, but mixing breeds, I'd have no clue. I'd just guess some would look like the roo, some like the hen, and some a little of both.

Here's a primer for learning genetics if you wish to.
https://sellers.kippenjungle.nl/page1.html

This is their main page where you can play around with it:
https://kippenjungle.nl/chickencalculator.html

Beautiful birds you have!

One of our resident experts on genetics, @NatJ could probably just give you the answer.
 
If I'm reading it correctly, the chicken calculator believes that your offspring will be uniformly blue laced birds. It doesn't seem to take size into account, but my suspicion is that they would be intermediate sized between the two breeds.

I don't see an option to plug in the silkie gene, but I'm pretty sure that it is recessive. So none of the offspring would look like a silkie.

I'm also fuzzy on whether any of the relevant genes are linked, or if they are all inherited independently. Im assuming independent inheritance, but I have no particular reason to believe that. Well, this URL suggests that chickens have 39 chromosomes, so there's a decent chance the genes we're interested in are not linked.

https://luxechickens.com/how-many-chromosomes-does-a-chicken/

So the F2 gets interesting then. That's where you could end up with a double copy of the lacing gene, plus a double copy of the silkie gene. That's going to be roughly 25% of the grand children.

To get even a single copy of the silver gene in there (I understand it to be a dominant gene? ) is a 75% chance, since the F1s should all have a single copy of it. That yields almost 19% of the grand children being silkie, well laced (2 copies of the gene) and silver.

You'll also need the Columbia pattern (dominant) and partridge brown version of extended black (this is recessive) and Melanized (dominant).

Keep in mind that it is late, I'm tired, and I'm not a rocket scientist to begin with, so.... if I add all those factors up, I'm looking at like 2.6% of the grand children will come out as a silkie version of a silver laced Wyandotte. I have no idea what lacing looks like in a silkie though. And if you're particular about the size of the bird as well, then that's a consistent I didn't attempt to account for.

So if you hatch those 6 eggs, and then next year hatch about 200 eggs from those 6 chickens, you should end up with roughly 5 birds that you're looking for. And with 5 of them, you'll have about a 94% chance of having at least one pair.

Next season you should plan on eating a lot of chicken.

If any of those genes are linked, and I don't *think* silkie is linked to any of them, then the numbers should move in your favor. If I'm wrong and the silkie is linked to one of those, the numbers get worse.
 
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Also those 2.6% chickens are still going to have a number of heterozygous genes, so they won't breed particularly true. But your odds won't be so terrible going forward. And assuming you want silver laced Wyandotte sized birds, you can continue to dip into the silver laced Wyandotte line to reinforce genes you want, probably crossing promising looking birds with pure splash silkies to check for what's hiding or heterozygous.

It's a big project, if you want to guarantee success. But it is doable on a single farm. It's also a cool project to try if you just want a couple birds and are OK with there being a bit if a lottery element to it.
 
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