White Red Laced Cornish- Color genetics

[Fordfunnyfarm]

I am getting black feathering coming through on some of my LF WLR Chicks. My pen mainly has jubilee hens, with a correctly colored WRL Rooster. The chicks that are coming out with the black feathers are more correct in the lacing. Is this something I could automatically cull for? Something I can work through, but I would like input!
Thank You

 

[GodLovesU]

I wouldn’t cull them!!

 

[JacinLarkwell]

@NatJ Knows genetics way better than I do.

Are you wanting to just breed WLR Cornish? I'd just get some correct hens at that point

 

[NatJ]

I am getting black feathering coming through on some of my LF WLR Chicks. My pen mainly has jubilee hens, with a correctly colored WRL Rooster. The chicks that are coming out with the black feathers are more correct in the lacing. Is this something I could automatically cull for? Something I can work through, but I would like input!

Short answer: yes, you can cull the chicks with black leakage, but I don't know whether that is the best choice.

Just to make sure I am not mis-understanding here:
White Laced Red has white single lacing on a red ground (one white edge on the red feather.)
Jubilee has white double lacing or multiple lacing on a red ground (two or more white lines around the red feather.)

If the birds with leakage are the ones with the best lacing, you could raise them for now and breed them to a good rooster, then see whether you can get some good non-leaky offspring from them.

Or you could try hatching a bunch more chicks, and see if you can get some with the good lacing and without the leakage.

Of course you could do some of both: hatch a bunch more chicks from the same parents to see if you can get some with the good lacing and no leakage, while also keeping one or two of the ones with the best lacing even though they do have leakage.

I don't know if the amount of leakage will change with age, but you might watch to see if it does. If it gets worse with age then you might as well cull future ones when it first appears, but if it disappears with age then they might grow up to be acceptable after all.

You can also watch the non-leaky ones grow, to see if some of them might have better lacing as they grow older. I've seen some laced chickens that looked pretty good as adults, but went through ugly stages as young chicks with the pattern not really looking like lacing at all.

@NatJ Knows genetics way better than I do.

I would guess that the leaky ones are heterozygous Dominant White, and the non-leaky ones are homozygous dominant white. But I could be wrong: they might all be homozygous but some just have other genes that make leakage more likely.

Longer form of the same:

There is a gene called Dominant White that turns black into white, but it sometimes allows bits of black to show through. The black leakage is more likely when a chicken has just one Dominant White gene, and less likely in a chicken that has two Dominant White genes, although each of those is a "more likely" or "less likely" rather than certain.

So you might have a rooster, or perhaps some of the hens, that have just one Dominant White gene instead of the two that might be expected. So they would be producing some chicks with two dominant white genes (one from each parent) and some with one (dominant white from one parent, but not from the other parent.

Or your flock might all have two copies of the Dominant White gene (which is correct) but some other genes are allowing the black to leak through.

Either way, the actual breeding decisions come down to the same few options:
--breed more chicks from these parents, trying to get some with good patterning and no black leakage
--keep the ones with good patterning and try to produce some chicks from them that have both good patterning and no leakage
--keep the ones with no leakage and try to work toward good patterning without the leakage coming back
--some mix of those