will i kill them??

[Debi214]

Do you know exactly how much to inject them with and at what weight (in ounces)? Make sure you know exactly what you are doing or you will end up with deformed chicks that you have to cull right away.

 

[hnbubz]

i have to kill all but the control 48 hours before they hatch. i knnow how much to inject per pound which is why i need to weigh before i inject

 

[Chicken Cluck]

How DO you weigh mass?

 

[hnbubz]

my honors bio teacher is gonna let me borrow her mass wheigher, she also let me borrow her incubator

 

[Debi214]

 

[hnbubz]

i do care about them, i am doing it for science and i will be keeping the ones that hatch, but i do not want a fight so you have the right to your opinion.

 

[silkiechicken]

Just to let you know...

An egg is an excellent model system in science. However, you are going to have a hard time measuring the change in weight. Eggs lose water weight during respiration during growth. Net weight will go down. Each egg has it's own shell porosity and that will be hard to account for.

Your experiment will need to measure how much of each is injected... but... uh... don't think it's gong to work like you think. There is only so much starting material in the egg, and even if you add some reagent, there will still be a limiting reagent endogenous to the growing embryo. If vitC and vitD are not the limiting reagents... nothing is going to happen.

Plus, if you are injecting these vitamins, what form are they in? VitC and vitD have different masses. Will you be accounting for this? Will they be in a metabolically useful form? The chick gets it's nutrients from the yolk, if you pierce that yolk, you will kill the chick.

In lab setting, like real research lab, if you manipulate an embryo, you do not pierce the yolk, rather, you go right under the vitelline envelope. You are also in a sterile tissue culture type setting when you deal with eggs experimentally. Any shell breaking you do will likly cause an infection and result in no live chicks.

If you really want to measure skin and bone growth, you would need to take the survivors, skin them and debone them, and weigh out what is left.

So really as a school project, it needs some more thought. Good for thinking and learning the experimental process, but after working with the chick embryo model and egg system for three years... at a university in a research setting for a period of time in hearing development and then muscle development, I would pick a different project for school.

 

[griffin45]

This seems like a great experiment. I would like to know how it turns out! If you open the incubator to candle, you can open it to weigh the eggs at the same time. If you are not candling then weigh the eggs on a candling time schedule. And I pray that someday you are a genius vet that loves animals and helps those of us without as much ingenuity and smarts!!

 

[silkiechicken]

Quote:
This is probably not going to work. And, if you don't kill the control, you don't have a control, as you need to take out the bones and the skin from the experimental and control and weigh them post hatch for results that have any meaning. Since the net building blocks of carbon mass will ideally be equal in all eggs, just adding vitamins will only redistribute the carbon in the tissues. For there to be any tangible results, you need to take out the tissues you are targeting.

Perhaps you look into embryology a bit first. The developing embryo by day 5 will be about the size of a lima bean. That size changes over time and will result in a chick under an ounce at hatch. The starting egg may weigh more than an ounce, but if I remember right, something like 20% of the mass is lost.

Oh... and you measure force. F=ma, where acceleration is our gravity and mass is the amount of the egg. Most use weight in place of force when dealing with stuff on the earth.

 

[hnbubz]

no, i plan on injecting into the embryo to see if it make the tissues grow on the chickens faster. or the bbones develop faster. i do not plan on disecting the chicken. the weight has been taken into consideration and i plan on going far with this experiment considering the last 3 years i have done science fair i have gotten gold at regionals and then gold at state. i put htought into it and with all the research ive done once injected into the embryo it will effect it. my sister did a simmiliar prooject but she injected lead to test what poison does on devoloping fetuses. things like this have been done and worked so it is really a trial and error and we will see how it turns out.
and giffing thank you so much! i wiill be posting results and while they are in the incubator. hopefully this brings on new ideas for next year considering im only a freshman