#I'm trying to learn chicken genetics (for fun)

[twotailednekomata]

Ahhh, a beautify, basic base for peahens. Perfect for customization.

Sidenote: If anybody knows any blogs or websites that shows pictures for specific genotypes, it will be greatly appreciated :3 Based on what I know, so far, I can already tell that finding out which genes a phenotype is expressing will be a nightmare so I want as clear as an idea what an allele actually looks like and work with other alleles as possible.

Additional, any websites that explain various chicken genes in an in-depth (but understandable) way is also appreciated (=^ェ^=)

[bejeweled-wahlberg]

Donlilah Out Of Context

Donnie: Oh just so you know, it's very muggy outside

Delilah:

Delilah: Donnie, I swear, if I step outside and all of our mugs are on the front lawn...

Donnie: *Sips coffee from bowl*

Donnie: You're right.

Delilah: That's... That's an unusual phrase for you. Did you just learn it?

Donnie: You're the love of my life and my best friend, I would do anything for you.

Delilah: I want you to eat three meals a day and have a decent sleep schedule.

Donnie: Absolutely not.

Delilah: You know, I'm starting to regret showing you how that blender works.

Donnie, drinking toast: Why do you say that?

Donnie: So what do you do?

Delilah: I work in genetic research, and I'm currently trying to eliminate all Cancers.

Donnie: Wow, impressive.

Delilah: Then I'll move on to Leos.

Henry: DAMN DAD

Molly-Ruth: Henry your a Leo too

Henry: Fuck!

Donnie: You stole from me first!

Delilah: Mhm.

Donnie: Stole my heart...

Henry: It is still illegal to commit murder.

Molly-Ruth: *hits Henry on the chest*

Henry: Ow

Delilah: I know you snuck out last night, Henry.

Donnie: Play dumb!

Henry: Who's Henry?

Donnie: NOT THAT DUMB!!!

Delilah: Donnie and I don’t use pet names.

Laurie: I see. Hey, what do bees make?

Delilah: Honey?

Donnie: Yes, dear?

Delilah:

Laurie: Don't ever lie to my face again.

1987:

15yo!Delilah to 29yo!Michael: Donnie was banned from the chicken shack, so we had to go out of town to get some.

15yo!Donnie: Well, they shouldn’t say “all you can eat” if they don’t mean it.

15yo!Delilah: Donnie, you ate a chair.

Back to Our Modern day Program:

Delilah: Jail is no fun. I’ll tell you that much.

Donnie: Oh, you’ve been?

Delilah: Once. In Monopoly Sweetie

Delilah: Name a more iconic duo than my crippling fear of abandonment and my anxiety. I'll wait.

Donnie: You and me!!!

Delilah, tearing up: Okay.

Delilah, Setting her stuff down on the table in the living room: So Babe what’s for dinner?

Donnie, staring at the food they just burnt: Regret.

Delilah: Date someone who will drag you outside at 3am to look at the stars.

Donnie: If anyone, and I mean anyone, wakes me up at 3am to go look at the damn sky they will be removed indefinitely from my life.

Henry: Dad you do that with mom when you have a nightmare

[sculptural-renaissance]

SGU Week Day 4 (oh are we still doing this): Favorite shi

Eli and Ginn were precious, and it's criminal that we didn't get more of them. C r i m i n a l . To say nothing of that double-fridging (that they did twice... ffs).

I like to think that Ginn would be all in for going to earth, and she eventually gets her wish after her file is removed from quarantine (with a sweet clone body grown from DNA harvested from her old clothes, which were initially saved to be backup clothing for some of the ladies on board Destiny, but later saved for cloning purposes [yes I'm aware this means her body would have been buried in some state of undress, but it was off camera anyway so it's fiiiiiiiine]).

Y'all say what y'all like about Family Guy, but the cutaways have tons of cultural references (I am frequently "Peter Griffin Explains the Joke when I watch with my husband). My thought is that Eli shows Ginn episodes of Family Guy to teach her about earth, which you can imagine leads to some pretty ridiculous misunderstandings.

Please do not enjoy this excerpt from The Eli Wallace Guide to Getting a Cute and Smart 3D Girlfriend

A while back, whilst hunting for meme fodder, I found a mean article written back around when SGU was airing. The gist of it was basically that Ginn was too "pretty" for Eli, and that a "schlubby" guy like him didn't deserve to be with someone conventionally attractive. Idk, maybe I'm old, but I think they're around the same level of cuteness. Also, bear in mind that in the past, having some extra weight was considered a sign of wealth and a positive trait. Eli's body type could easily be a selling point for Ginn, who is apparently interested enough in leaving the Space Cartel that she's willing to risk her life for it. To her, Eli is sweet, smart, cute, and her ticket to a life so cushy that luxuries she can't even imagine are considered commonplace. He's the entire package. 🧡

Look, I'm not creative. This is verbatim from Family Guy, but it's funny as hell, so it's going in the post.

This is Vital Information, mainly because Eli is definitely dragging her to a comic con at the first opportunity. God, imagine being an alien and going to a con, and it looks no different from that trading post you used to go to every month

Gotta learn about Halloween, AKA the best holiday! I do wonder what kind of holiday celebrations they might try to have on the Destiny in some hypothetical future where they can get supplies from earth, especially with all those Lucian Alliance members from various other planets. Obviously not something worth showing in a show that was mainly focused on survival, but it's a fun idea for fics.

And yes, at this point, Family Guy is the only TV show Ginn knows, except for the ones they mention on the show.

Please enjoy the references to Mean Girls and Parks & Rec.

Apparently raisins are a universal constant, too, which is good because I love them and will tolerate no raisin-slander on my page

"Shut up, Eli, you don't have a band." Fr tho "Spaceship Full of Bees" is an awesome band name

This is actually one of the shorter "episodes" I've done, in which Dale gets the bright idea to keep bees on a spaceship. I looked it up, and you can't keep honeybees inside, not even in a greenhouse, because they need more space than that to roam around. Maybe they could genetically engineer some that are suitable for pollinating weird space plants on a starship. No way will that hilariously backfire. Ginn is clearly familiar with the steroid bees, so she will probably think they're normal.

Dale's other idea is to get chickens. Maybe they can get some domestic space quail instead. They're smaller.

"So after we finished Family Guy, we watched some of The Cleveland Show. Then, when I took her to the zoo, she threw a beer into the bear enclosure, and that's how we both got lifetime bans from The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo."

But yeah imagine learning all this random pop culture info from some raunchy cartoon so you can fit in on an alien planet, but no one bothers telling you that the second-most common pet on that planet can't talk. Good luck to everyone when Ginn meets a parrot...

[argarath-snep]

Minecraft mod ideas!

Pet House This mod brings a change I think should be in vanilla, ROAMING PETS!

I know there are mods out there that already do that, but I still think they do too little, what I want to do is make them have the ability to roam around a point and not get too far from said place! Imagine you make your nice house, you place your bed down and now your pet kitty will just roam around that bed until you call them to go exploring! No more leaving your cat forever sitting down by your bed to not run the risk of losing them! I also would love to have a thing like a pet bed block that looks just like a wool block so that the builders can make these glorious pet houses to their babies! Imagine a colourful room with fluffy interior for your pets! or a big luxurious bed for your little prince of darkness Mittens! Another thing I would like add to the mod would be commands. What do I mean by commands? I mean being able to train your pets to follow a simple command when you "say it" out loud in the game! You write a message like "Tamagochi, sit!" and your bupper will sit down without you needing to go all the way to them to right click. And while where talking about right click, we scrap the normal thing and add petting your pets when you right click them! We need to be able to pet the kitty, bupper and even the lil screechers we call parrots <3 And the last thing I would like to add to the mod is... Making other mobs your pets!! Why not have a pet cow? They are so smart and kind and cuddly too!! Who wouldn't love a loyal chicken to follow you around and just be a fun little creature with you? Maybe even give a lil moss to that creeper that just hangs out around your house and make them your friend! They're just too shy to come greet you!

Plants mod (I literally have no idea what to call it, sorry)

This mod I know I wouldn't really have the ability to make unless I had some actual classes but I'll try it anyway some day. So! What is this? It's a mod that adds plants that give you resources (how original...) but this time you will not just make them the perfect genetic version of them, no no, this time you'll make their growth place suitable for the plants you get! How? with green houses of course!!! My idea was based off the annoyance of every x thing giving you resource mod making genetics the be all and end all of making the resources easy to obtain. Why not make it so that you need to build a greenhouse on the nether for that nether plant that gives you magma cream? Why not make a cold greenhouse with very dry air infused with 🎇magic✨ to grow some diamond plants? We can do much more than just Übermensch of plants (punching a nazzi is always right), and with a way to make your own greenhouse, it would also incentivize building! In a building game!! Look at that!!! The even bigger goals for this mod would be integrating some of those crazy cool things from terrafirma craft, like seasons, climate depending your coords (like having the equator be at X=0 and going further away from it makes the temps lower and stuff) as well as dirt nutrition levels! The really crazy goal would be to even integrate some ecology somehow like making the place you grow your plants be good for insects makes the plants grow better, so you are incentivized in making your farm as good for the environment as possible! I know this isn't as big of a change to the other plant mods, but I am just so tired of the excruciating grind of cross breeding plants/bees to make them be the best possible one instead of making their place be good for them to help them flourish. I'm not a good builder at all, but even I know that these mods incentivize not building places for your things, they incentivize making it all either in the open or inside an ugly dirt/stone cube, we need more things to make us want to build in this building game!

Anyway! This was all for now!

I hope I inspired some of you somehow, and I hope I can learn to make at least some of these things myself. Please feel free to discuss and send your ideas I would love to hear what others think of these, and my BF could def use a break from me constantly talking his ear off with these ideas lol Have a great day everyone!

Gah I wanna make minecraft mods but sitting down and learning java can be harder than actually learning java for me ;-; If anyone is interested I'll be posting the mod ideas I have and I will try to make them, but if anyone is interested in making them please go ahead and just give me an @ so that I can watch and even use the mod cause they've been living rent free in my brain for the last few months actually

[raptorsandpoultry]

Hii, I have four chickens and your posts about hens have been useful for me. Right now I'm worried with two of my chickens because one keep pecking the other when they go search for food. Also she now is very scared of me and the others too, she often stay alone and far away. Also I noticed she eat less and she is smaller than the others. Her feathers and eggs are always is a bad state :c I worry about her a lot but Im not sure what to do, I tried separating her a few times in the day

Hi anon, I’m so sorry to hear about your poor little hen.

Unfortunately it wouldn’t be responsible of me to give you too much advice without knowing more details about the situation. How big is their coop/enclosure? Do they free-range? What’s a normal day like (for all four of them)? Please don’t be afraid to DM me, I’m happy to try and help!

For starters though, feather-pecking (abnormal behaviour in which more dominant chickens peck at the feathers and/or skin of their less dominant flockmates) is a very multifaceted anomaly - similar to human psychiatric disorders such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, there are many genetic and environmental factors at its root. Chicken behaviour and welfare scientists who have been studying this behaviour for decades still aren’t 100% sure why and how exactly it develops. My honours undergraduate thesis project was on feather-pecking, and despite the months of work that I put in, I probably didn’t even scratch the surface of just one of the contributing factors (I have been meaning to write a post about it)!

What the research community seems to agree upon so far though is that feather-pecking is 1) a learned behaviour, 2) in part, re-directed foraging behaviour, and 3) can be triggered or exacerbated by crowding or a lack of space.

So, without being there in person to see your chicken’s living conditions and how they all interact with each other, I can give you some very general solutions. Since feather-pecking is a learned behaviour that might be a result of a lack of foraging opportunities, this means that chickens can learn to re-direct this behaviour away from their “victims”, as long as you set up their environment for this. Generally in animal training, the best way to “get rid of” an undesirable behaviour is to replace it with something else through training, or re-direct it onto another stimulus, which is usually enrichment. Enrichment is anything that encourages natural behaviour (such as pecking while foraging for food) in a healthy manner. This can include toys, a pile of leaves, food items like lettuce heads to keep the chickens stimulated and occupied...The list is endless, but what this will do is provide an opportunity to re-direct your chickens’ pecking behaviour away from their victim to their toys, food, etc. People often think it’s enough to just let their chickens out to peck around in the grass all day - it’s not. They will get bored, just like any other animal, and thus they need a variety of ways to keep themselves busy and just have fun. Lastly, if #3 applies to you, then you can do whatever you can to give your chickens more space, especially places (nest boxes, high perches, etc.) that each one can retreat to and hide in when they need to get away or have some private time to themselves.

I’ve written about enrichment a few times before, so hopefully these can give you some ideas: https://raptorsandpoultry.tumblr.com/post/182984461607/what-are-some-good-chicken-enrichment-items

https://raptorsandpoultry.tumblr.com/post/182964422255/for-todays-bonus-round-of-enrichment-ft-birds

https://raptorsandpoultry.tumblr.com/post/182895619761/manipulative-toys-are-a-type-of-enrichment-that-is

Last but not least, training is a form of enrichment too! This will definitely give your chickens some extra mental stimulation that might tone down their motivation to feather-peck, and if you focus on the little one who’s getting bullied, it will also help build her confidence and strengthen her trust in you: https://raptorsandpoultry.tumblr.com/post/175377508102/for-those-of-you-who-dont-know-i-have-been

I hope this helps. Again, please feel free to message me if you want to discuss more in detail. It’s clear that you care about each of your chickens very much, and the fact that you’re looking for advice to make things better for them is a huge step in the right direction!

Sources:

Blokhuis HJ. Feather-pecking in poultry: its relation with ground-pecking. Applied Animal Behaviour Science. 1986 Aug 1;16(1):63-7.

Hughes BO, Duncan IJ. The influence of strain and environmental factors upon feather pecking and cannibalism in fowls. British poultry science. 1972 Nov 1;13(6):525-47.

Kjaer JB, Sørensen P. Feather pecking behaviour in White Leghorns, a genetic study. British Poultry Science. 1997 Sep 1;38(4):333-41.

[eyes1nthewoods]

What drew you to genetics and evolution? I have a degree in ecology and the genetics modules were some of my favourite! What kind of clothes would you sew, do you have projects in mind? And please tell me about one of your little world building ideas, if it's not too personal?

putting under a read more because this turned out really long auishdjashjdsdfasf

so i've kind of always been obsessed with animals/science/biology but the thing that got the interest in genetics to spiral out of control was the sims 3 pets expansion. i was obsessed with making my horses as realistic as possible, which snowballed into me researching which genes did what. i didn't fully understand it (i thought i did) but i had the gist of it, and it was a lot of fun, tbh! i found a few other games with breeding mechanics (Niche, Flight Rising, a lot of pet sites i can't quite remember), obsessively researched a few other animals (budgerigars and cats were pretty easy for me to understand. chickens are interesting but it's hard to find information/examples of specific genes/alleles. i've tried to research dogs before but i had trouble understanding for some reason, i think i'll try again someday tho. reptiles are just PAIN because breeders use different/straight up wrong terminology) and i eventually found 2 minecraft mods which add genetics to the game!

one is specifically for horses (Realistic Horse Genetics) and the other plans to eventually add genetics for pretty much all of the animals in minecraft! (Genetic Animals) they're my favorite mods ever and i've learned a lot about genetics and how they work from these two mods and their communities!

also i figured out that colorblindness in humans is a sex-linked recessive trait after learning about chicken and cat genetics! it's why people with XY chromosomes are more likely to be colorblind :) i was really proud of myself lol

i'm not quite as interested in speculative evolution as genetics but i've dabbled a bit. i'm surprised i don't have more to say about this actually. in my old headworld griffins and dragons have a common ancestor, and dragons used to be large super predators but are now small and widespread, like birds.

as for sewing i found some SUPER CUTE fabric which has various dinosaur skeletons on it!! i want to make it into a button-down. i also want to make a pair of green overalls that i can embroider plants and bugs on :3c

my latest worldbuilding project was a homebrew dnd setting, but that's the one i burnt myself out on, so i've been taking a break from it. i also don't have anyone to play it with. or the energy to dm. i did change elf lore because on the forgotten realms wiki i learned that the word drow is canonically derived from a slur??? and that didn't make sense to me (still doesn't) so i changed their history a bit and made them the moon elves (i think in forgotten realms moon and sun elves were both just different flavors of high elves. why) also most of the humanoid races that appear similar to humans evolved from the same species. elves are the descendants of human/fey hybrids. dragonborn are so far the only race that was created by a higher power.