Is black or grey a dominate color?

[Futuregreenefarm]

I have a grey or blue jersey giant hen. She is beautiful and I love her grey color. She was with an Easter egger/creme leg bar mix rooster that was really beautiful with mixes of bright red and orange. A broody hen hatched 2 of the giants eggs for me. The chicks are now almost 12 weeks old. The female chick is solid black with no hint of grey. The male chick is beautiful grey like the egg giver. He has started to crow now. But he has no color coming up on his wings yet but a few speckled feathers and some green sheen. I was hoping he might get some red or orange from the rooster. Not that it matters that much..he is already handsome but I only keep them to protect the hens. Just wondering if there is a chance he might develop more color?? Any chance the female will develop more grey color like her egg giver?

 

[AinaWGSD]

So the grey in this case (blue) is incompletely dominant. Blue is a dilution of black...it turns black to grey. One copy of blue gives a (more or less) solid grey bird with no black at all* Two copies gives you a very pale grey or white bird with darker splotches of grey, called splash.

Your jersey giant is blue, so she has one blue gene that she can pass on to her chicks and one black gene to pass on. It sounds like one chick inherited a blue gene and the other chick did not.

*blue comes in a huge variety of shades, ranging from very pale grey to so dark it's nearly impossible to tell from black. So while it's extremely unlikely your black chick will develop more grey like her mother there is a very very small nonzero chance if she is in fact a very dark blue. But by 12 weeks I would expect she probably would have lightened up a little if that was the case.

The rooster, being a mix of breeds and colors, is a lot more tricky to predict color genetics. The red you are describing sounds like color leakage. Leakage can either be obvious, or so faint it's barely there and reallyeasyto miss. If so, the chicks may or may not develop a little red leakage as their adult plumage comes in.

One thing I'm confused about is that you said the cockerel has a green sheen. But if he's blue that shouldn't be possible.

 

[Futuregreenefarm]

I went and got a couple of pics. The first is the my jersey giant, Bonnie. The black one is the pullet, Tilly. And the rest are of the cockerel who I named Theo. Can you see the green on his back?

 

[Futuregreenefarm]

And this is the rooster I had but I don't have him any longer. He was beautiful but he was so aggressive, we couldn't walk through our yard without getting attacked so he had to go..... unfortunately.

 

[AinaWGSD]

Fascinating! It kind of looks like he has patches of black. I wonder if he's a chimera. Or if the rooster was part cream legbar if the cream dilution gene has something to do with it (although my understanding is that dilution gene affects all of the color not just parts).

 

[Futuregreenefarm]

Sorry to be dumb but what is a chimera?

 

[Amer]

I went and got a couple of pics. The first is the my jersey giant, Bonnie. The black one is the pullet, Tilly. And the rest are of the cockerel who I named Theo. Can you see the green on his back?View attachment 3885787View attachment 3885782View attachment 3885783View attachment 3885784View attachment 3885785

And this is the rooster I had but I don't have him any longer. He was beautiful but he was so aggressive, we couldn't walk through our yard without getting attacked so he had to go..... unfortunately.View attachment 3885798

Both roosters appear to be barred. Both are quite gorgeous.
Sometimes black feathers just show up on blues or barreds. It doesn’t mean anything. Could be a somatic mutation or the barring/blue mutation didn’t express properly.
Black is a dominant color (blue is a black-based color) which is why your hens offspring are black-based, but I expect the rooster will gain some color in his hackle and saddle as he ages, as black crossed with other colors usually has some color leakage.

 

[AinaWGSD]

Sorry to be dumb but what is a chimera?

A chimera is an animal with more than one genotype (set of genes). It's kind of like conjoined twins, except instead of two bodies that are connected in some way the bodies merged into one single body during development. The most striking examples are gynandromorphs, where some cells are male and some cells are female, often divided right down the middle.

Somatic mutations are a mutation in a cell or group of cells that happens after a sperms cell and egg cell start dividing into an embryo.

 

[J-Habs]

Riding the coat tails of this thread since it seems some of you might know about blue genes. I have this rooster who is from a Splash Marans rooster over an Easter Egger hen. What can I expect when I breed him to Bielefelder, Red Sex Link (I know they don't breed true) and a Black Australorp? I'm wondering if he'll pass any blue.

 

[AinaWGSD]

He is blue, so he has a 50% chance of passing the blue gene on to his chicks. The blue gene diluted any black pigment to grey (blue), so if any of his chicks inherited the blue gene from him any parts of the pattern that would have been black will be blue.

Bielefelders are barred, and any chicks hatched from that cross would be sex linked, barred cockerels and non-barred females. With the australorp I would expect more or less solid chicks (with some leakage). These two hens are going to produce chicks with black pigment, so these chicks are where you're going to see blue if your rooster passes on the blue gene.

I'm not as familiar with red sexlink genetics, and there are several ways to get red sex sex linked chicks and without knowing which genetics are involved it's hard to say what to expect. If your sex link is carrying dominant white (turns all black pigment to white) you could potentially end up with white chicks with red or possibly black leakage (one copy of dominant white tends to fail at turning  all the black to white).