Potential way to hatch more female chicks?

[Mylied]

I shouldn't have responded. This urban legend goes around at least once a year. People try it out. Some claim it works. Some claim it fails. But it's not like you can do an accurate study in your living room with a handful of eggs. I hatched out 10 out of 10 cockerels with no dead eggs just recently. If that happened during during an experiment to test this theory, I'd be biased to blame it on the experiment. Who can conduct a conclusive, repeatable large scale study with expertly calibrated machines? Large poultry house who happen to want to only hatch females. They don't use this method. That should be proof enough it doesn't work. All your doing is stunting growth on your chicks and hurting those chicks that do hatch.

 

[Jennc-123]

No, apparently eggs that contain male chicken embryos will simply not hatch if incubated at a slightly lower temperature than normal. Or so the article says. The verity of that claim needs to be proven though. Cue this thread.

I was going to say this. Temperature can abort male fetuses. There are plenty of studies that corroborate. There is no transfer of male to female, just death.

 

[Mylied]

Here's one study on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032579119384251

 

[CrazyCochin]

Read this article to see what I'm talking about

Has anybody with an incubator ever tried out this method before? If you did, what were your results?

We use broody hens, and a trick we've used that usually works is picking out the most rounded eggs!

 

[RoosterWhisperer]

Usually, we use round eggs, but it's not always a surefire way...

 

[RoosterWhisperer]

(Why hello...lady from PontyPandy!)

 

[CrazyCochin]

(Why hello...lady from PontyPandy!)

(Huh... oh how could you tell?)

 

[RoosterWhisperer]

(I'm from the glorious kingdom of Hyrule, we don't have pyromaniacs like Norman price...)

 

[CrazyCochin]

(I'm from the glorious kingdom of Hyrule, we don't have pyromaniacs like Norman price...)

 

[JaeG]

I have not personally tried it, but I have a friend that does it in her frequent hatches and she says it is successful. She learned it from a breeder that also does that trick and also claims it is successful. Next spring I will try this with an autosexing breed to see if it really does work.

Hens decide the sex of their offspring and some hens will naturally make more future female eggs than male eggs.