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The Original All Roller Talk Discussion Board Archive >
Blind Youngsters
Blind Youngsters
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birdman
29 posts
Jul 20, 2005
2:10 PM
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Has anybody ever had a pair of rollers that produced blind youngsters?
I put a pair together this year and raised 8 youngsters from them. Every single bird has been blind except one which was only blind in one eye.
Also interesting is that they have all been black or extremely dark check youngsters with black skin and beaks. (The cock is recessive red and the hen is a blue check self). Both were mated differently last year and no problems at all.
Very Strange!
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big al
57 posts
Jul 20, 2005
2:44 PM
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Birdman,
Now that's interesting!
This is way above my head but here's a guestimation... Since more than one baby was born this way there may be a deficiency in one of the parents thats severe enough that it won't allow them to reproduce a particular gene or cell thats needed for eyesight in the offspring. Switch out the parents to different mates and find out who's got the deficiency.
Could be a hereditary trait rearing it's head?
Like I said, above my head just a guess.
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Big Al
"High Plains Spinner Loft"
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MCCORMICKLOFTS
81 posts
Jul 20, 2005
4:09 PM
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The dark skin and beak (and most likely their feet too) is an indicator of the Dirty factor being present. The blindness is very odd, but based on the way you described the matings it is apparent the cause is recessive in nature, both parents carrying one gene for this recessive fault/mutation. Maybe Frank M. has seen something like this before and can explain it in greater detail.
Brian.
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Mount Airy Lofts
27 posts
Jul 21, 2005
6:36 PM
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I bred one last year. It was a Black Grizzle young off a White Tick x Black Mottle mating. Don't know if this pair would of produced more blind Black Grizzles because I only let the pair go 2 rounds before breaking it up. The pair produced 2 Lavender Grizzle, a Tort, and the blind Black Grizzle. Never found out the cause of this. I was temped to repair this pair up next year but we'll have to see.
Thor
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Riaan
10 posts
Jul 21, 2005
10:21 PM
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Hi Brian
Wat is the "DIRTY FACTOR"?
Friend in the sport
Riaan
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bluebar
5 posts
Jul 21, 2005
11:39 PM
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No, Brian, this is something I've never heard of and it's extemely interesting (if not a good thing for the breeder). It could be a new dominant or recessive mutation popping up but as suggested, it might be Salmonella or something else doing it too. I remember a friend of mine having a lot of blindness problems one year and it turned out to be a bacteria in the fluid of the eye - I don't remember the bacteria, I think, and I stress think, it was a Staphyllococcus. The eye looked almost like it was "Cooked".
DO NOT just take these birds and remate them to other stuff. IF, and I stress IF, this is a recessive mutation popping up, you WILL NOT get rid of it by simply remating the birds. What you will do is simply spread the mutation among your flock and leave yourself open to lots of misery for a lot of years.
If, on the other hand, it's a dominant mutation that has appeared in either the cock of the hen (8 out of 8 is really beginning to stretch those random numbers though), then it can be taken out of the loft by simply getting rid of whichever parent carried it and also all the young. PLEASE if you do this offer the birds to some of the pigeon geneticist who would love to play with them. Paul Gibson can put you in touch with someone. pigeongibs@aol.com A mutation to blindness would only be useful to geneticists because it helps up find out what else is on the genome.
(I am also posting this thread and information in it to a mess of my genetics buddies to see if anyone else has ever heard of anything like this.)
Frank Mosca
Last Edited by bluebar on Jul 21, 2005 11:43 PM
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MCCORMICKLOFTS
86 posts
Jul 22, 2005
12:18 AM
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Thanks Frank. It would be interesting to discover the reasoning behind it. I suggested the same thing about donating the birds to one of the genetic gurus on our West site in regards to getting "curly" feathered recessive red babies.
I had an old cock get what I termed as parathyphoid of the eye, with the results being as you described as a cooked or dead and dried out eye. He's fine and still producing like clockwork although his name is now "Pirate". lol
Riaan. Dirty is a color modifier which gives the bird's color a deep base tone. Most see them in those blue bars which are very dark, almost a charcoal blue coloring. In some breeds it is considered good as it helps to intensify colors such as red or black. They are easily identified in the nest as they will have black feet as well as dark or black skin. This only lasts for a few weeks though often the feet will change to a deep, vivid red color.
Brian.
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bluebar
6 posts
Jul 22, 2005
6:39 PM
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Here's a suggestion from a buddy of mine in Missouri. Not a bad suggestion either.
Hi Frank,
I would pull eggs and see if fosters raising a clutch would raise them any differently. By pulling a round the breeding pair can then be medicated before the next round to test for sickness passed through the egg.
John
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birdman
30 posts
Jul 22, 2005
10:08 PM
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By examining the pedigrees I see that this pair are distant cousins. Both birds are healthy and were paired to different mates last year with no problems. I am beginning to think that Brian is correct, that it is a recessive that both birds carried. All birds are healthy and I don't think that salmonella/paratyphoid is a factor as I vaccinate. I'm sure scratching my head over this one!
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bluebar
7 posts
Jul 23, 2005
4:41 PM
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Birdman,
Please, please, please - don't discard these birds or their young if you can at all hold onto them.
Obviously, they're of no value in the air for you, but if you would, you could contact Paul Gibson pigeongibs@aol.com There may well be one of the folks working with the Pigeon Genetics News Views and Comments group that might want to put in the time to determine exactly what's going on. If YOU want to be the one to do that, you can also contact Paul and I'm sure he'd be happy to suggest a breeding program so that you could track the numbers and quantify the results. It might be hard to breed from the blind kids, but blind birds have bred in the past - usually in an individual where they are trained to locate the food/water, etc. Likely hens would do better than cocks - just because a sighted cock would have an easier time mounting a blind hen than vice versa.
Beside, if this IS a mutation and if you have it in your stud, you're going to need some testers to mate to your stock to locate carriers and eliminate them.
Frank
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birdman
31 posts
Jul 23, 2005
6:00 PM
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Frank, Sorry but I culled each of the youngsters when it was apparent that they were blind. I have one last youngster in the nest from this pair (the hen layed the other egg out of the nest)and it is too soon to tell if it is blind. As for the parents, I mentioned earlier that I mated them to different birds last year and all were healthy. I will keep you posted on how the latest youngster turns out.
Thanks for the info.
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bluebar
8 posts
Jul 23, 2005
10:28 PM
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Okay, I sort of figured that. But here's the possibly severe problem. You say that you mated the birds to other mates and the young were fine. If, and I stress IF, it turns out that this blindness IS a result of a mutation, and if you simply remate these birds to others then what you'd be doing is spreading that very mutation throughout your loft pool.
Let's go outside of this example for a second so you can understand what I'm saying. Let's suppose that you have a loft where there is absolutely no recessive red in the gene pool. For you, recessive red is a "disease", you just hate it. Let's say for the sake of argument that you unknowingly bring in a pair of birds that each carry recessive red. You pair the birds to others in your loft and all the babies are "fine" - they are normal colored. Then you pair these birds you brought in together and suddenly, you pop out 9 youngsters. Let's say 8 are "ill" - they are recessive red and you hate that, so you kill them. 1 is "healthy" so you keep it, but it stands a very good chance of also carrying recessive red.
Let's now say that you take the parents that are breeding these recessive reds and you split them and remate them to others in your loft. None of the babies will be "ill" (recessive red) because none of your birds presently carries recessive red. So none of the young produced are homozygous for the factor, therefore none will show it. However, about 50% of them will now carry the factor and at some point down the line you are going to be popping out a LOT of "ill" (recessive red) birds, and almost 100% of your loft will likely carry the factor.
In like manner, If - and again I stress IF - this blindness is the result of a recessive mutation, then you could unwittingly be doing the same thing in your loft at the moment with "blindness" as you might have done with the recessive red example above. That's the only reason I would caution you about repairing these birds and simply breeding out of them until you've definitely ascertained if this is genetic, environmental, chemical, etc.
Good luck no matter your decision though
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MCCORMICKLOFTS
90 posts
Jul 24, 2005
12:33 PM
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Frank, obviously you are much more knowledgeable about the characteristics of inheritance, but I am beginning to think that recessives in the gene pool aren't necessarily as vile as we often make it out be. The reason for this assumption is based on something that occured in my own lofts. If you will allow me I'll elaborate.
In 1998, I started with two pair of black self wests. They were only distantly related. One of the pair, a click pair, produced several blacks, nearly all of which had the faint red lacing commonly seen in young blacks that carry recessive red. I didn't realize it at the time. I put one of the daughters back onto her father and the first baby the produced was a recessive red. In the next few years I discovered that pretty much all of the young off of that pair that I stocked and were mated back into the family (cousins, half bro/sis, etc) would produce at least one recessive red during the breeding season. I have only brought in two different family birds into this entire large family, so basically what I have now is a very large family that is very, very inbred. I haven't raised a recessive red baby from any of them in over two years. And consequently I have noticed that most of the babies are now not showing any red lacing in the juvenile state. In some unique way, this gene has somehow began to disappear, or so it seems. But according to genetic logic, it should have intensified in the gene pool. I am still breeding from several of those birds right off of that first foundation pair, as well as their mother. Now common sense would allow us to assume that given at least 50 percent of the birds in the gene pool do carry, or possibly carry recessive red (because of the intense inbreeding) that I would be seeing many, many more recessive reds produced. But such is not the case.
In my rollers of which I bred from about 25 pairs this year, many of them do carry or are recessive red. But in going through the kit boxes just the other day, I realized that I only raised about 10-12 recessive red rollers out of 150 banded. Given the recessive red gene is present throughout the loft, I would have expected a lot more. When I compare these results with those in my black self west family, they seem to be quite similar in production percentages and I suspect it would be very close in numbers if none of my roller parents actually were a recessive red just like in my black west family where none of them are homo recessive red.
Now I will consider that recessive color genes and recessive physical genes could possibly be distributed in a skewed fashion from one another, though their inheritance is the same (recessive).
What's your take on this?
Brian.
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bluebar
9 posts
Jul 24, 2005
2:45 PM
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Hi Brian,
Excellent question, but what's happening is not necessarily what it appears to be. Weird huh? ;-)
okay - let's see if this makes sense. It's not necessarily the homozygous expression of a recessive that is in the gene pool it's the percentage of the recessive to the wild-type (or dominant) that's going on. Without ANY selection, something called the Hardy-Weinberg law comes into effect. Basically, it just says that with RANDOM mating the percentages of one gene to another begins to stabilize and the percentages become pretty standard. However, it doesn't mean that any particular bird will be homozygous for that gene, only that the gene is in the gene pool at a fairly fixed rate.
Now, this is for totally RANDOM matings. There is always some selection in a loft, even a very inbred one. It may even be unconscious selection. For example: You may keep one bird because its color is slightly better than another, even if both are great in the air - or you may keep one because it plays more with you than does another that's a tad more wild, etc.
It's not that "recessive" is a bad thing. Hell "roll" is recessive and if you are putting your birds into the air you sure as hell want THAT recessive in them. It's that it's much, much harder to find which birds are carrying a recessive that you don't want than it is to find a bird carrying a dominant that you don't want. If I absolutely hated almond rollers, all I'd have to do is get rid of every almond in my loft and I'm done with it forever. On the other hand, if I absolutely hated webfooted birds (and i do, by the way), it might take me years to finally get rid of everything in my loft that carried the gene, and even then I might not be sure for years more that i'd finally wiped out all the carriers.
The reason I suggested that he not breed the possibly blind producing birds back into his stud is because we don't yet know if it IS a mutation; if it is recessive; if so, if it is triggered by some environmental problem, etc., so why take a chance on having it within a population and have to dig it out later.
You're getting mostly blacks now. I can pretty much guarantee that if, for whatever reason, you haven't been accidentally selecting for particular features in the matings so that you are simply getting more homozgyous wild-types (at the recessive red locus), then at some point - maybe next year, maybe the year after, but sooner or later, you will have a breeding season, where you will pump out a lot of recessive red. My buddy did that a few years back with his self black line of Oriental Rollers.
By the way, there may be something happening here that I'm still only partially conversant with. There IS now beginning to be some good evidence that environmental factors can shift the breeding results, perhaps because of induced physical and chemical changes to the egg/sperm production in the adult. I read somewhere that even Hollander was amazed to find that cooler weather seems to trigger more recessive red homozgotes (less light? rather than cooler weather??) So the fewer than expected results of recessive red phenotypes MIGHT be a function of the temperature at the time you breed the adults. This is still a bit speculative and it's something I really would like folks to start keeping records of -- temperature of breeding days and color of young produced.
There is some really good information on various colors & results of breeding in ferals in Feral Pigeons by Johnston. It's literally one of the more interesting books I've ever read, though definitely a bit more technical than most.
So---- to answer your question. No I don't think recessive is necessarily a bugaboo. But in case of blindness, I'd be real careful of playing with anything even suspected of carrying it in a flying loft. Because of the way this board is structured, I can't read your note at the same time as I post so I'm going to go back to it in a second to see if I've covered all your points.
Frank
Last Edited by bluebar on Jul 24, 2005 2:51 PM
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highroller
41 posts
Jul 24, 2005
7:07 PM
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Bluebar,
That's interesting info on environmental effects on breeding. I have a cock that carries the reduced factor and last year I got one or two reduced hens from him. This year, mated to the same hen I get a reduced in every clutch and one clutch had both reduced. By the way, it is much hotter here this summer than last.
Dan
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