In chickens, the gene for silver is dominant and sex-linked. Gold is the wild or normal version. This gene is the basis for creating the very popular red sexlinks. To create sexable chicks with this gene, you need a silver female and a gold male. Some white breeds are really silver (Rhode Island Whites, for example) and those will work, but most breeds we think of as white are based on either the dominant or recessive white, and will not work as the female side of the cross (unless the hen is recessive white and silver, but you can easily determine that from the appearance. If a white hen has a pattern, like silver laced) then it is almost always silver. This presents an interesting opportunity for small breeders to create sexable gold-laced breeds (polish, wyandottes, cochins, etc).
Apart from creating sexable chicks, this gene can also be used to produce both silver and gold chicks from a single pen. Doing this requires that you know the genotype of the cock, as his genes control the color of his daughters. If he is heterozygous for silver (looks silver, but has only 1 copy of the silver gene), then about half his daughters will be silver and the rest gold.
The colors of the male chicks is more complicated because the hen’s genes also come into play. If the hens are gold, half of the male chicks will be silver, but have a copy of the gold gene (from their mother), and the rest will be gold (gold gene from each parent). This creates a self-sustaining breeding group as long as you only keep gold pullets to replace their mothers and silver cockerels to replace their father.
If the hens are silver, then all the cockerels will be silver (remember the red sexlinks where all the male chicks are silver since their mother is silver). The pullet chicks will still be half gold (the mother’s genes do not come into play at all with her daughters when it comes to sex-linked genes). Half of the cockerels will carry a gene for gold and half will have 2 copies of silver – but you can’t tell by looking at them.
In this situation, where half the pullet chicks are gold and half silver, it is really most useful if you can also sex the chicks. You can’t use the silver gene to sex them, as you are using that to create the color ratio. Is there another way to color sex them? As it turns out, there is. More on that in the next post.