as another poster reminded me, this is a chicken site,not a political site, there was a post on another site asking how to determine egg color of chickens. with my limited knowledge,i explained about white eggs, how white eggs become brown and blue eggs. several posts were adamant about the color of the ear lobe determines egg color, even citing books on poultry. i.e.,white lobes~white eggs, red lobes~brown eggs,except in the case of 4 to 5 breeds. they had no mention of white ear lobes with red in them or turquois lobes as in the silkie which procuce several shades of brown, some with the very slightest green. not somrthing i ever gave much thought to before, but with infomaniacs breeding programs, you must have thoughts on this.
Hi Robbpa, my white silkie (blue earlobes) lays as close to a white egg as I've ever seen besides store bought. The one black silkie that I have that's laid also lays white eggs.
hanna, the white silkies we have also produce verywhite eggs, the buff,and crossed colors produce a very slightly tinted egg. the pure blacks produce a light brown egg. i have ( not too scientificly) autopsied all the different colors and the blacks have the darkest everything. they are a real interestin creature and i would like to work with them. the problem is what to do with uneeded offspring. at the local livestock sale they are mostly worthless.
Silkies have the white pigment in their earlobes that is associated with white shelled eggs. I really don't know if the enamel white earlobe is really associated with the white shell. Mediterranean breeds have the white earlobes and lay white shelled eggs, but the initial cross lays a tinted egg and subsequent matings of the hybrids together results in a range of colors, but still mostly on the light side because the of the dominance of the brown inhibitor. You can breed the white earlobe before you breed the tint out of the shell. I haven't seen any papers that have definitely linked the two.
Well... I too would like to avoid the politics (I have
and a gypsy bird is ?
Rob, as I infer the meaning of the term, "gypsy"
Forgive my ignorance but I always thought that white ear lobes mean white eggs and colored ear lobes meant colored egg shells. Perhaps the hybrids with colored ear lobes laying opposite colored eggs is because they're hybrids so the original "natural" rule about lobes/eggs is nullified.
I believe the discussion was about a genetic
P.S. we have blue earlobe birds some of which
Sumatras have gypsy face. It is different from the black skin of Silkies. The black of the Sumatras seems to be on the surface while the black skin of the Silkie goes deeper into the dermis and other tissues. The genetics are unknown, but it can be easily lost. You just have to look at all the red faced Sumatras that you see at shows to know that. You see some intermediate types so the genetics may be complex, and or there may be more than one type. Some breeders claim that gypsy face will darken if you expose the birds to sunlight.
a white agg is white inside and out, same,same with the blue, but does a brown egg have a brown shell, or is the brown color applied to a white shrll. is brown coating applied to blue egg to give it a greenish color. if you crack a brown egg and peel the tissue from the inside of the shell, it is white. cant the brown be removed by scratching it off.
Rokimoto, I have read a lot about Sumatras, but we
Robbpa, we evaluate the "blue potential" of a layer
Barry has a picture of a Sumatra on Feathersite:
By HannahH on Sunday, December 23, 2001 - 06:04 pm:
By Robbpa on Sunday, December 23, 2001 - 08:59 pm:
By Rokimoto on Monday, December 24, 2001 - 12:41 am:
It is so hard to breed a clean white shell after crossing that you tend to see it after backcrossing to lines which of course have the white earlobes. The best experiment would be to see if you could select for a white shell and the red earlobe, or the white lobes and a brown shell. I know that you can have tinted shelled eggs and have the white earlobes because I've had birds with it.
By Infomaniac on Monday, December 24, 2001 - 02:13 am:
promised myself that I won't even look at the last
posts in that thread) and I can contribute a little bit
to this thread.
We have brown layers with white ear lobes... we
have brown layers with BLUE ear lobes and we
have brown layers with red ear lobes ...
We do not have any white layers with anything but
white or yellow ear lobes. But, I suspect that this is
because our white layers are all genetically related
to our Leghorn line... which is a white ear lobe line.
Our Araucana have red ear lobes and lay
blue-green eggs. We have an Ameraucana hen
that has white ear lobes and lays a blue egg ( the
most blue egg we have on the farm but the
eggshell is inferior so we don't breed her)
Frankly, I believe that ear lobe color is a polygenic
trait and is not an indicator of eggshell color.
The white color of white ear lobe species is due to
purine compounds that collect in the skin of the ear
lobes. I am not certain, but I will bet my money (if I
had any) that the blue ear lobes are also purine
compounds... only blue ones rather than white
ones. The red color is due to the absence of any
pigment compounds and, like the comb and
wattles, is due to the vascularization of the skin
there... one is seeing the color of blood when one
sees red ear lobes. Our gypsy birds have black
ear lobes.
By Robbpa on Monday, December 24, 2001 - 02:25 pm:
By Infomaniac on Tuesday, December 25, 2001 - 10:33 am:
from reading Smyth, Somes,Carefoot..., she is a
bird that has dark comb, earlobes, and black face.
The black face is black skin around the eyes,
cheeks, beak and et cetera.
I don't believe much is known about the genetics of
gypsy. It may be a number of things...perhaps
even polygenic. We have 5 gypsy-face birds now,
but not a single one of them is male. Next season,
I intend to do some breeding with them to see if
there are any statistics I can identify (statistics of
recessive or polygenic traits).
Our first gypsy-faces appeared as sports in our
Black Barred line. Way back up the ancestor list in
that line is an old heavily eumelanized, rose-comb
black hen of unknown origin (amazingly, she just
appeared out here at the farm one summer day
years ago ... I believe someone just dumped her
out like they do unwanted dogs and cats.). She is
ancient now (but, still living), short, squat, wide,
unfriendly, but doesn't lay anymore and it has been
years since I've seen a rooster mount her.
Decendants of this old black hen are the only ones
that have every shown any gypsy-face. Now, it
seems poetic that this old, wandering hen gave us
gypsy decendants. But the gypsy-faces took 5 or 6
generations to appear.
By Josh on Wednesday, December 26, 2001 - 03:28 am:
By Infomaniac on Wednesday, December 26, 2001 - 10:03 am:
linkage between earlobe color and eggshell color.
The statement in the original post of this thread
was about the earlobe color determining the
eggshell color, which is not at all a true
statement....the eggshell colors are determined by
the eggshell color genes, and while the linkage
relationships are not known, we have evidence in
our flocks that the eggshell color genes are not
linked to the earlobe color genes). It very well may
be more commonly seen that white ear lobe birds
lay white eggs....I certainly don't dispute that....
certainly, the largest number of eggs produced on
earth are white and by Leghorns, which happen to
have white earlobes. So, just statistically, if you
see a white egg somewhere, it was most likely laid
by a pullet with white earlobes. This "natural rule"
is nothing but a coincidence.
My point is that there should be no genetic
relationship between eggshell color and earlobe
color. First of all, earlobe color is a polygenic trait
and the polygenes are not going to all be on the
same chromosome. Secondly the eggshell color
genes are also on different chromosomes (the
blue and brown eggshell genes are not on the
same chromosome ... there is one blue egg gene
and as many as 13 brown eggshell genes have
been proposed and white is just the lack of blue
and brown). With all these genes involved on
different chromosomes, there simply is no genetic
linkage / relationship between earlobe color and
eggshell color. It is easy to see how the myth
arises in the lay-people who haven't spent much
time thinking about the heritability of earlobe color
and eggshell color, but it is a myth.
We have blue egg layers that have both white and
red earlobes (not the same chicken!). We have
brown egg layers with white, blue and red
earlobes.
By Infomaniac on Wednesday, December 26, 2001 - 10:07 am:
lay brown eggs and others that lay blue eggs
By Rokimoto on Wednesday, December 26, 2001 - 10:37 am:
By Robbpa on Wednesday, December 26, 2001 - 03:52 pm:
By Infomaniac on Wednesday, December 26, 2001 - 05:54 pm:
don't have any. I also have read that the
gypsy-face will darken with sunilight exposure...
Our birds do free-range but we havn't monitored
the gypsy birds... (yet)..we know who they are and
we bred them this winter (winter 2001 / 2002).
From 100 eggs from that line we got only three
more gypsy-face birds.... the babies are doing well
right now... and our fingers are crossed that they
will continue to do well because we want to do
some breeding experiments with them.
We are observing now that the black-face gets
redder at sexual maturity... but it is still very dark... a
mixture of black and red.... when I was in Hungary
in 1982 (during the Falklands War) the Hungarian
Gypsy people had black and red garb. It seems to
fit well the description of our gypsy pullets.
By Infomaniac on Thursday, December 27, 2001 - 10:07 am:
by looking at the inside surface of the eggshell.
Usually, this means tearing off the membrane that
covers the inside suface of the shell. The brown is
largely a coating on the outside surface of the
eggshell as one can see by looking at the inside
surface of a brown eggshell ... it's white. In fact,
you can scrub off most of the brown pigment on
brown eggshells with a scouring pad and warm,
soapy water.
Hutt proposed 13 genes to account for the range in
brown eggshell color. Our line of Sil-Go-Links
(silver-gold-sex-links) is a cross line between
Deleware and Rhode Island Red. Both the
Deleware and the RIR are brown layers. But, the
Sil-Go-Links lay brown eggs that span the whole
range of brown color from a very light tan to a dark
red-ochre. Their eggshells are not simply an
average of the eggshell colors of the parent lines.
Somehow in that cross, the brown eggshell
spectrum gets spread out among the F1 pullets.
The brown and blue pigments are porphyrins. The
brown one is a 'metabolic' byproduct of
hemoglobin (if you allow me to use the term
'metabolism' for the degredation and recycling of
the hemoglobin) and the blue one is made in the
liver.
By Infomaniac on Thursday, December 27, 2001 - 10:59 am:
http://www.cyborganic.com/People/feathersite/Poul
try/CGP/Sumatra/BRKSumatras.html
Of course it is hard to tell with certainty from a
photo, but I believe our gypsy-face birds are darker
in the face than this bird that Barry shows. It does
seem that the gypsy face goes with a complete
black beak, as it appears that the Sumatra has.