Chicks with a leg up

[Murgatroyd]

There are experiments showing that chick embryos exposed for 24 hours a day to white light get their left/right locomotor skills 1-2 days earlier and have 20% longer tibia bones than chicks incubated in darkness. There was also an increase in hatchability, a decrease in incubation time by at least 6 hours, and a decrease in abnormal symmetry in the embryos. Other experiments show that broilers incubated under green monochromatic light develop heavier breasts. Light exposure also caused the chick to absorb more of the yolk sac sooner.

Then, other experiments indicate that exposing the embryos to recorded chick calls, sitar music, or classical music enhanced the chicks neural wiring. Maybe I should put the clock radio next to my incubator.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0051348
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22399743