Cockatiels: What is the difference between split and visual?

Question

I am going to get a grey male cockatiel and a female whiteface cinnamon pearl. I checked on the internet to see what babies I will get from them. These were the results:


Mother:Whiteface Cinnamon Pearl
Father:Grey

male offspring:
100% Grey Split To Whiteface {X2: Cinnamon Pearl}

female offspring:
100% Grey Split To Whiteface

So, what's the difference between visual and split?

Answer 1

Split means they carry a recessive gene, but you can't tell by looking at them. Visual means the gene is obvious by looking.

A bird can only be split for recessive genes. Dominant genes are always visual, even if it is paired with a recessive gene.

Answer 2

Visual means you will see the trait, split means that one of the chromosomes carries the recessive trait, but it is not visually displayed in the birds coloring. The bird is genetically half of the recessive trait, but you can't tell by looking.

It's really complicated when you start dealing with multiple colors, but I'll try to explain. Here's the deal:

The traits you are looking at are all recessive, and the cinnmon and pearl are recessive sex linked colors. This means they are carried on the chromosomes that determines the sex of the offspring. Male cockatiels have XX Chromosomes. Females Have XY. The recescive cinnamon and pearl factors are carried on the X chromosomes. which means that to see the color on the bird, males must have two X chromosomes with the trait, one from mom and one from dad. Females must have one chromosome with the trait, from dad, since the Y chromosome she gets from mom doesn't carry those two genes.

Now the whiteface is a normal recessive gene. That means that they are carried on chromosomes OTHER than the ones that determine sex. So in order to be displayed, both mom and dad must carry at least one gene each for that trait. In other words, if one parent exhibits the trait (a visual whiteface for example) and the other parent carries only one of the whiteface genes (so you won't see the whiteface, but genetically he is HALF whiteface) then some of the babies will have the trait and some will just carry the gene and not display it. In your example, if dad carries no whiteface genes, the chick will only get one gene for it from their mom and that is not enough to see the whiteface color. However, breed these chicks to a whiteface and you will get whiteface chicks.

The male being a normal grey (the dominant color) will provide the grey gene to all the offspring. Since grey is dominant, all the birds will look grey. The female will provide three recessive color genes to the male chicks (cinnamon pearl and whiteface) but since the boys need two of each of those genes to exhibit the color, the grey will override it and you just see grey. The female will only give the whiteface egen to her daughter since the cinnamon and pearl are not carried on the Y chromosomes.

The girl chicks will only get the Y chromosome from momma, and the Y carries no color info, so they will only have the whiteface and not the cinnamon and pearl.

A better pairing to achieve more fancy colors would be to start with a MALE that has the sex-linked colors and a female that was normal grey colored. If you started with a cinnamon pearl male, you would get cinnamon pearl females (100%) and normal colored males split for cinnamon and pearl (100%) To get the whiteface both parents would need to carry at least one gene for that color.

I hope that answers what you need to know.