SREL Reprint #3055

Playing chicken with red junglefowl: identifying phenotypic markers of genetic purity in Gallus gallus

I. L. Brisbin, Jr.1 and A. T. Peterson2

1Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, Drawer E, Aiken, SC, USA
2Natural History Museum, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

Abstract: We report the results of a novel experiment, in which genetically pure male red junglefowl Gallus gallus (Richardson strain) were deliberately crossed with domestic female chickens to create contaminated lines of known purity, reaching as high as 93.75%. Phenotypic characters generally used as indicators of purity (reduced or absent female comb, male eclipse plumage, etc.) all appeared to at least some extent in domestically contaminated progeny and moreso in successively more pure generations of the experiment, suggesting that such phenotypic characters may have little, if any, utility in characterizing red junglefowl stocks as to their genetic purity.

Keywords: red junglefowl; Gallus gallus; hybridization; genetic swamping; feral chickens

SREL Reprint #3055

Brisbin, I. L., Jr. and A. T. Peterson 2007. Playing chicken with red junglefowl: identifying phenotypic markers of genetic purity in Gallus gallus. Animal Conservation 10(2007): 429-435.

This information was provided by the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory (srel.uga.edu).