I recently adopted a pair of Cleartail Parrots and I have a question.

815coke

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Hello, my name is Kim, and I live in south Korea.
Recently, I purchased a wonderful and lovely pair of clear-tail parrots. However, I have heard shocking news regarding this excellent pair of birds. Since both parent birds are clear-tail, it has been reported that the hatchlings may suffer from genetic defects, leading to poor eyesight and very poor health. I understand that in order to prevent genetic defects, at least one of the parent birds should be a clear-tail carrier (split). Is this true? Will all the offspring from this pair of birds I purchased be born with severe genetic disorders? That would be a very heartbreaking situation.
The birds I purchased are as follows: - Clear Tail Violet Blue/Cinnamon (Male) - Clear Tail Turquoise Blue Cinnamon (Female) They are not related by blood and are in a healthy condition.
 
Are you planning to breed them together? Can you breed them to different partners?
Sorry for this long message but I love bird genetics so here are my thoughts.
Assuming they're IRN cleartails (CT), it's a simple recessive gene. Your birds both have two CT genes.
I couldn't find any info online that indicates that breeding two visible, homozygous CT IRNs together causes priblem chicks.
The babies from this pair will be no different from any other CT IRN. The fact that both their parents are homozygous for CT only means that all their chicks will be CT.
Look at it this way- if both your birds were Heterozygous (split) for CT (visually normal) 25% of their chicks would be CT and those chicks would be no different from any other chicks that received those two CT genes, like if the parents were vislible CT homozygous. A CT chick from two CT parents is no different from a CT chick from a CT parent and a parent split for CT. Does this make sense?

I know that recessive pied budgies are bred together very frequently because the trait is attractive and their babies are not unhealthy. A recessive pied budgie from two recessive pied parents is no different from one with split parents- the genes are the same. They aren't different just because the parents each have two of them.

Some breeders of exhibition show English Budgies believe that breeding visual recessive pieds together results in offspring that lack the size breeders want but that's not a health issue.

Opaline is a sexlinked recessive in budgies (male needs two genes to show opaline and females need one) and male and female opalines are bred together all the time with quality chicks.

Lutino/ Albino (ino) is also sexlinked recessive but there is some evidence that breeding ino males with ino females produces weak young. Not sure why that would be since an ino from that pairing is not different from an ino from any other pairing. Perhaps ino birds are just weaker anyway and combining two weaker birds is a bad idea. If the ino gene makes birds weaker somehow, it would seem that the weakest ino birds would be the males because they have a double dose of the weak ino gene. Ino affects much more than color pattern. The melanin pigment is gone and the eyes are red. The gene could cause changes that we cannot see that weaken the bird. This would explain why ino male budgies are so rare- rarer than they should be just based on being sex linked. Opaline males need two recessive opaline genes and they are quite common and healthy.

Sorry if this was confusing or TMI. Genetics are weird.
 

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