Telling gender from inside the egg experiment

[britesidefarm]

I’m interested in different ways to tell gender before hatching. I’ve already tried the myth of pointed eggs being cockerels and rounded eggs being pullets, and put in around eleven rounded and one pointed to see if it would work, but ended up with eight cockerels. (The one pointed ended up being a gorgeous girl). Now I’m interested in other ways you might be able to tell. (Myths and all). I’ve heard about hatching “in Ovo” but don’t think it’s possible to do that at home. Any ideas?

 

[AngelaY]

I don't know of anything but am interested to see how this goes!

 

[RoostersAreAwesome]

A helpful article: https://www.backyardchickens.com/articles/an-experiment-in-chick-sexing-methods.72520/.

 

[NatJ]

A helpful article: https://www.backyardchickens.com/articles/an-experiment-in-chick-sexing-methods.72520/.

I was just looking for that one to add

https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/the-ring-nail-test-experiment-just-for-fun.1372667/

Here's a thread where someone was trying one particular method (result: doesn't work.)

And here's one I made up:
point to a chick, then flip a coin. Heads means the chick is male, tails means it's female.

If you use a coin with a woman on the "heads" side, then heads would probably indicate female and tails male.

(No, I haven't tested it. Yes, I expect it to be right about half the time if you try it with a large enough number of chicks--because random chance would make you "right" about half the time.)

 

[EggWalrus]

If you don't want males, I heard boiling the eggs works before letting the hen sit on them.
But that's just liable to reduce the female hatch rate too.

Honestly, there is no way to determine sex while in the egg. There's been 100's of hairbrained and eggheaded ideas about sexing eggs, but no one has ever been able to replicate results, even if they got lucky guessing the first time. If it could be done, hatcheries would be doing it. Think about it.

 

[Eelantha]

One way to influence chicken gender before hatch is with increasing/lowering the incubator temperature. Read here (sespecially the link in the very first post) to see if that's something you want to try.

 

[RoostersAreAwesome]

One way to influence chicken gender before hatch is with increasing/lowering the incubator temperature. Read here (sespecially the link in the very first post) to see if that's something you want to try.

That doesn’t change the gender, it influences the survival rate of one gender, right?

 

[Eelantha]

That doesn’t change the gender, it influences the survival rate of one gender, right?

That's what I'm not sure of. I'm prone to say it's the survival rate of one gender over the other, but I have no idea if the embryo can switch gender inside the egg during incubation to better survive. Kind of like with crocodiles - do the number of hatchlings that emerge match the number of eggs their mother laid at first, or do only half those hatchlings, all the same gender, get out while the rest die in their shells? Some reptiles can switch genders in the wild, there's even one species of lizard that can produce offsprings without any male needed, so as far as chicken embryos go, I have no clue if the gender dies or switches inside the shell to come out the fairer sex. The writer of the article seems to think you'll get a lower hatch rate because the male embryos will not hatch, but there's not been enough reported testing to make that fool-proof yet.

 

[NatJ]

That doesn’t change the gender, it influences the survival rate of one gender, right?

Yes, according to everything I have read.

And it's a fairly small percent change, too. So it may go from 50/50 female/male to something like 50/40 with 10% that didn't hatch (but would have hatched under normal circumstances.) That's not enough difference to notice if you're hatching small batches of eggs.