kedreeva: kedreeva:(x)It’s so difficult to find a good photo of a charcoal peacock, but here&r
kedreeva: kedreeva:(x)It’s so difficult to find a good photo of a charcoal peacock, but here’s a charcoal blackshoulder someone posted to one of my groups. Usually their wings are grey and it’s hard to tell that the bird isn’t also grey instead of black (most photos are overexposed in order to see detail), but in person, they are a black based bird.Charcoal peafowl are a mutation that shouldn’t be bred forward; their lifespans are often half what a normal peafowl’s is, and the hens are all sterile. It survives and continues to be bred because people like melanistic birds. Charcoal is propagated via breeding the males to hens that are heterozygous for the mutation, which for many breeders often means breeding a male to a wild type hen, and then breeding the het charcoal hen offspring back to their father. @vincedakota asked if there were any more ethical dark morphs, and there are a couple!Buford bronze, sonja’s violeta, and midnight morphs are all good, dark ones.Here’s a buford bronze BS, though this is a little washed outAnd a sonja’s violeta BS (sometimes people call these ones “violet” or “violete” instead of violeta but the person who original produced the morph named them Sonja’s Violeta after either his wife or daughter I forget which, and I choose to respect that nomenclature, especially since it makes it easier to tell someone’s talking about THIS morph instead of european violet). They actually shine purple in good light.And a midnight BS Interesting. Do people have any idea why full charcoal hens are sterile and the lifespans are short? It sounds like they’re pretty inbred but I’m surprised that one of the most basic colour mutations that crops up in animals is apparently linked to such extreme negative health effects.Do people think it’s a specific downstream effect of the allele (the solid black colour is directly due to the breaking of some vital but not-immediately-lethal mechanism), or it happens to be linked to another deleterious mutation but could potentially be bred out by outcrossing to standard birds for a couple of generations (tbh probably a huge undertaking)? Do they show any like neurological problems? Is the lifespan just due to overall ill health? -- source link
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