Poultry have been studied just as thoroughly as other farm animals. Here is a University fact sheet--if you scroll to the end you will find a long bibliography of published work on the subject, and that just scratches the surface. http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mdarre/poultrypages/light_inset.html
Quote:You are correct, it is a link from their ancestral past. In either the above fact sheet or the one I posted previously, this fact is mentioned. I will correct you on one thing--it isn't actually the amount of light that the chickens' bodies are reacting to. It's actually the length of the dark period. For us humans, it's easier to talk about number of light-hours, but what you're really doing is limiting dark, not supplementing light. That's why you don't need very much light to affect the hens, just enough to read by instead of super-bright.
Thanks for that link... it was indeed enlightening.... (pun intended). I do recall now from my earlier biology/botany courses, after you mentioned it, that it was indeed the darkness period that triggers the hormonal changes rather than the light interval, same in plants. Just possible my old grey matter getting punky....![]()
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