A new hope for male chicks in the eggs industry.

[Ridgerunner]

There are certain reptiles and fish that the temperature during egg development can affect the sex of the hatchling. I just did a bit of online research and found that they don't seem to understand how it works, plus they like to use words I don't understand. At least in some the "females" have the male chromosomes but have female behaviors and can lay viable eggs.

Chickens are not reptiles or fish.

"Startup" makes me suspicious it's just a fundraising gimmick. There have been fraudulent startups before...

This was my first thought.

The idea that you can control the sex of a chick by manipulating the incubation temperature has been around forever. As huge a breakthrough as something like this would be I have trouble imagining that the poultry industry with all the millions they have spent on research would not have tested this. If they did there should be a study on it. Does anyone know of such a study?

 

[Chicken Heel]

When one starts playing God, one gets the Devil instead.

 

[Shadrach]

Oneonly needs to read the title to know this is suspect.
Even if the process worked which I can see no evidence of, making males turn into females isn't saving male chicks.
There are reasons why 50% of each sex hatch. Far better to accept that nature knows what it's doing and adapt to it rather than interfere with it.

 

[Toothpick]

They are not completely wasted. Mostly turned in to livestock feed from what I understand. Overall would be a good thing if they can change the sex in the egg. With more hens laying eggs perhaps egg prices will remain low, or go lower. I doubt whatever “egg lobby” there is will be OK with this though.

 

[HenriettaPizzaNolan]

I'm confused how they can do this with it still being non-GMO (as they stated). They don't really go into how sound frequencies can influence the gender of the chick so it makes me wonder what else is at play.

I'm all for killing fewer baby roosters, but I'm also against meddling with genetics and such. I think it will be a while before this takes off (if it does), and I hope we can get more info on it before the egg industry begins to use it.

 

[Akrnaf2]

I'm confused how they can do this with it still being non-GMO (as they stated). They don't really go into how sound frequencies can influence the gender of the chick so it makes me wonder what else is at play.

I'm all for killing fewer baby roosters, but I'm also against meddling with genetics and such. I think it will be a while before this takes off (if it does), and I hope we can get more info on it before the egg industry begins to use it.

If you have chicken that lay 200-300 annualy You already have an animal that has been changed genetically (yes, by selection and not by genetic engineering but still changed) the red and green jungle fowl lays 1-2 clutchs of 12-18 eggs.

 

[Akrnaf2]

About sex determination in the animal kingdom the chromosome mechanism is only one of many.
Turtles and crocodiles are depending on the incubation temperature
Whit sea breams ( Sparus Aurata) is the age. All fish younger than one year are males and females are older.
A species of Agama lizard the red-headed rock agama
(Agame agama) it is the social position. If the dominant male die or killed one of the females transform to male.
And there are a lot of other examples.

 

[RiverOtter]

All embryos start out as female.
"Male" is triggered at a certain stage of development, and yes, there can be a lot of factors besides genetics that trigger it, and not just in birds and fish. I have a freemartin cow - she's genetically a female, but functionally a hermaphrodite, because of hormones that her twin released in the womb as he was developing.

If you find a way to not trigger an embryo to flip that developmental switch, it is totally possible to hatch all one females.

 

[InterestingChickens]

Here is an interesting article about this 'experiment'. In this piece of writing, it mentions, 'Soos speculates that sound suppresses the expression of the DMRT1 gene – widely accepted to be responsible for sex development in poultry.' Clearly there is some type of genetic modifying going on here - I do not see how this method could be GMO free as they claim it to be.

According to this article, 'Soos' doesn't know what exactly causes the sex change to happen. You would think they would have found out what caused this, before making their discovery known to the public.

 

[Iluveggers]

If you have chicken that lay 200-300 annualy You already have an animal that has been changed genetically (yes, by selection and not by genetic engineering but still changed) the red and green jungle fowl lays 1-2 clutchs of 12-18 eggs.

I would describe this as breeding toward desired traits. In humans, it would be similar to two super-athletes (think Shaquille O’Neal and Serena Williams) having a child, and their child growing up and reproducing with another product of super-athletes. The result would hypothetically be a stronger, larger, more athletic human. Versus parents going in and scientists inserting and extracting certain DNA to “create” a super-athlete. One is naturally done, the other is created in a lab.