The questions people ask!

[beauty2thebirds]

I randomly sell eggs through ebay and I received this question yesterday and just had to share. This is a copy and paste...


Hi I'm not sure if you are capable of determining the sex of the eggs but if you are I'd prefer mostly female with 1 or 2 males. If not that fine. Have a great day!

Now is this too funny,? or what are your thought to this?

 

[sunny & the 5 egg layers]

I randomly sell eggs through ebay and I received this question yesterday and just had to share. This is a copy and paste...


Hi I'm not sure if you are capable of determining the sex of the eggs but if you are I'd prefer mostly female with 1 or 2 males. If not that fine. Have a great day!

Now is this too funny,? or what are your thought to this?

It is funny!

I have heard of it before (Determining the gender of the chicks by egg shape). As far as I know it is a myth.

 

[sumi]

My MIL swears by it! So does a friend of ours... another guy used to drive me crackers coming here to buy eggs and picking out "girl" eggs from the tray I put my day's fresh eggs in, ready for selling. (Strangely those also happened to be the biggest ones...

)

 

[EweSheep]

Its a myth and so are the temperature differences...we are not incubating alligators! It is just not done!

 

[ChicknThief]

Its a myth and so are the temperature differences...we are not incubating alligators! It is just not done!

Hmmmm.... Incubating alligators.... Now THAT would be interesting!

 

[punk-a-doodle]

From what I understand, temperature can have some effect on gender...just not in the same way as reptiles. For instance, females are more likely to die if a temperature goes above the ideal range. So, you could technically hatch out all males due to temperature (but the females just died, they didn't alter genders...but it may help contribute to that myth). Also, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/a-drop-in-temperature-can-change-the-sex-of-chickens-1238516.html showed that while still genetically a certain gender, temperature changes do alter the body so that they function reproductively like a female. It alters about 10% of males, and the catch is that if crossed with a normal male, they will only produce male chicks. Chickens are "weird" by our terms because of the way gender is determined on a cellular level. http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/03/no-sexual-confusion-for-chicken.html There was a nice little drawing somewhere that illustrated the concept nicely, but I can't find it.

We may even be able to check the gender of our unhatched chicks with ease one day. http://www.springerlink.com/content/w81m50423k51u4l8/

Cool how sometimes myths have some counterpart in real life!

 

[chickened]

male sperm are faster swimmers.

 

[cassie]

But female sperm live longer.

 

[they'reHISchickens]

On that theory, would eggs fertilized in the later part of the 3 week window that sperm live in hens, produce more female chicks? Now THERE is a science fair project!!

 

[A.T. Hagan]

Just this week I had it pointed out to me I did not understand the way gender is determined in chickens after all these years. Had a fellow who had been hatching his own birds for decades convince me it was the male (as in the rooster) that determined this the way it works with mammals (as in us).

But it's not. Chickens are avians and their system is very different.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system

In birds it's the HEN that determines the sex. Not the rooster and not the incubation temperature (unless it's so hot the female embryos die as was noted above).

He'd bred and hatched who knows how many birds, some of the best I'd ever seen at the time, but had it wrong on the mechanics all that time and it never occurred to me to question it.

Learn something new every day.