cockrel/pullet ratio

[doxies1]

Our Seramas are giving us a very high ratio of male chicks. Is there any explaination or is it just chance? I know in dogs if we breed late in the grump cycle we get more male and if we breed early we get more females. Is there anything like bator temp or anything else that might be a factor in chickens ?

 

[Ridgerunner]

None that I am aware of. In chickens, the hen determines what the sex of the chick will be when the egg is fertilized, not the male. All this stuff about changing the sex of a chick by incubating hot or cold, high or low humidity, or anything else defies the laws of biology. They are not reptiles.

Some people think that a certain hens is more prone to have males than females, or the other way around. I'm not convinced that is true, but I don't know everything. I do know a bit about the laws of probability and I know you would have to hatch out a whole lot of chicks from a whole lot of different hens to get a statistically relevent number before I would accept that.

I once ordered 6 straight run chicks from a hatchery and got 7 females. Even the packing peanut was a female. The odds of 6 being female with no males is 1 in 64. The odds of 7 females with no males is 1 in 128. As I said, it takes a lot of occurrences to get a significantly relevent number.