color mutations?

[#1ThaiBoxer]

How come color mutations don't happen in th wild? In the wild how come all the peachface lovebirds are the standard green peachfaces? In captivity I see so many color variations

[Keltoth]

It's because the color mutations you see now are the results of 70 years of selective breeding. In the wild, the mutations rarely had a chance to manifest because there just was not a genetic base to support the pairings needed to produce the different colors. This is due, in large part, to the fact that the gene that produces the Wild Green nominal color is dominant - meaning that any time the green bit of the DNA strand is matched up with a non-green bit, the green bit asserts itself and that is the color that you see, while the non-green bit is hidden away. It is not like there never were any mutation colors in the wild - they were jsut so rare that they were squeezed out when they occured by the dominant genepool.

The mutations came about through breeders inbreeding their lovebirds; brothers to sisters, aunts/uncles to nieces/nephews, etc. By doing this, they were able to match up the recessive genes within family lines - thereby bypassing the dominant Wild Green genes - to produce new mutations. Once a sufficient quantity of the new mutation was possessed, the breeders would then back-breed the mutation-colored birds to Wild Greens, in order to get new blood into the line to produce healthier variants, which were, in turn, bred to others that had been back-bred, to make mutations that were more healthy and robust.

- Eric

[LauraO]

It's because the color mutations you see now are the results of 70 years of selective breeding. In the wild, the mutations rarely had a chance to manifest because there just was not a genetic base to support the pairings needed to produce the different colors. This is due, in large part, to the fact that the gene that produces the Wild Green nominal color is dominant - meaning that any time the green bit of the DNA strand is matched up with a non-green bit, the green bit asserts itself and that is the color that you see, while the non-green bit is hidden away. It is not like there never were any mutation colors in the wild - they were jsut so rare that they were squeezed out when they occured by the dominant genepool.

The mutations came about through breeders inbreeding their lovebirds; brothers to sisters, aunts/uncles to nieces/nephews, etc. By doing this, they were able to match up the recessive genes within family lines - thereby bypassing the dominant Wild Green genes - to produce new mutations. Once a sufficient quantity of the new mutation was possessed, the breeders would then back-breed the mutation-colored birds to Wild Greens, in order to get new blood into the line to produce healthier variants, which were, in turn, bred to others that had been back-bred, to make mutations that were more healthy and robust.

- Eric


The new pockets of lovebirds in Arizona and other places in the U.S. are mostly the green wild type. You see a couple pics here and there of other mutations, but I'm sure you will see less and less non-wild green lovies as they breed more generations in the wild.