FINCHforum

How do you classify a bird as a mutation?
is it just done using the birds colouring or does size & shaped come into it somewhere.
with gouldians there are 100's of different colours available now, zebras are much the same, societies have the crested variety and then there are the pied birds.
are these all considered to be mutations or are there different categories of mutation.
do the genetics of the bird actually change over time when breeding for a new color, or is a color change more of a modification.
should be interesting to hear what people think.

Technically speaking, a "mutation" is anything that does not exist naturally in the wild.

So with zebras, anything other than the normal grey coloration is a mutation.

Some "colorations" are considered modifications because it is not actually a change in the genetic make up that is necessarily responsible for the way the bird looks. It could be the result of a hormonal imbalance, or a lack of some vital dietary component, or a lighting issue.

An example of this would potentially be melanistic and blue breasted gouldians, as well as pieds, where so far no one has really been able to identify a single "heritable" value associated with these colorations.

Unlike something like "blue" which is known to be a mutated autosomal recessive gene.

I think asking if the genetics change is a tricky question.
Do the specific alleles possessed by the birds change? Yes - for the same reason no two humans are identical..
But the components of the DNA which make a bird a "Gouldian" or a "Zebra" remain the same..

Otherwise we would be witnessing speciation and so far we have not seen that ;)
All "mutations" of Gouldians still belong to the same genus and species

What confuses me is this....
In the wild there is only one color body color, one breast color, yet three mutations of head color.
How do we know that lutino, blue, albino, dilutes, etc. do not happen sometimes. Maybe they do but the wild parents reject them due to them not being "normal". They are discovering that they certainly react to head color as adults. They do not react to chicks head color because they don't have it.... but as Tiffany has noted many times, the young chicks have skin colors that identify it as not being normal. I would think the wild color minded gouldians would react to this and toss..abandon, or just plain not feed these chicks. Just a thought.
Afterall the first dilute and yellow that started the blues, silvers, pastels, whitebreast, lilacbreast, etc. had to be created from regular bodied, breasted gouldians.
The reason these Polymorphisms, color mutations, exist is due to selective breeding and feeding/fostering by humans.(at least in the early developements) Left to the natural selection of the wild parents...they are seen as flawed mutants.... Also a good reason to occaisionally breed back to the wild color forms to strengthen bloodlines.
I do think that the genes can change. Also in the cases of Modifications the equivelant in humans would be this example. The gene is damaged as the cell duplicates itself from free radicals. Such as cigarette smoke damages the cell that it splits into a mutant cancer cell. Like melanistic bird mutations, the cell can be killed, repaired and future cells being healthy and resorting back to the normal function/color that it was intended.
Okay, I have rambled long enough but you did asked for peoples thoughts

CandoAviary wrote:What confuses me is this....
In the wild there is only one color body color, one breast color, yet three mutations of head color.
How do we know that lutino, blue, albino, dilutes, etc. do not happen sometimes.

They do, of course People have seen blues in the wild. Whether it was a captive bred bird that escaped, or a product of a freak breeding in the wild, who knows.
Despite their vibrant coloring you'd be surprised how camouflaging it is in the wild. The main reason mutations do not "exist" in the wild is because they are usually more easily picked off by predators (specifically the case with albino offspring that have been seen in everything from snakes to deer).

Also - while OH exists, it exists in very small numbers - like 1 in 1,000 or something. It is definitely much more populous in captivity than it is in the wild.

I am not to familiar with all the finch mutations as of yet. I am more familiar with parrotlet and lovebird mutations. Mostly the lovebird end of it.

I owned a pair of lovebirds, male paechface and the female was Dutch Blue. When they bred every clutch they had threw were red pied peachface split to dutchblue. None of the babies looked or even hinted at the Dutch Blue coloring. All had deep red faces with red pied feathers across the wings and down the backs.

I lived in New Jersey at the time just outside of Princeton, our avain vet checked the offspring since he was interested in purchasing the clutch for an aviary he had in the middle of the back office (really nice round large glass enclosure with trees and plants and a shallow pond). When I bought the babies in he said he had not seen anything like it before, pied red lovebirds. Who would have figured the outcome from two plain parents but something in one or both of the parents genes created this.

Lovebirds come in such a wide range of colors, dilutes, different face colors. Most of the colors are due to humans manipulating the gene pool to get a certain result. I often wonder if it effects the longevity and health of the chicks with all the different color mutations we try to achieve. I know with dogs breeding them to get a smaller dog has certain health risks.

At the bird shows I am starting to see odd mutations within parrotlets like muddy colors, pieds.