Please explain how chickens keep laying eggs even without a rooster. And are all birds like that?
In: Biology
Any bird (female) can lay an egg without a male. I had a cockatiel who would and she didn’t have a mate.
Chickens have also been bred to produce a *ton* of eggs in a constant stream. The red jungle fowl, which is the bird chickens are bred from originally, will lay about 7 eggs twice a year. Total of around 14ish. There is a good reason for this, since fertile eggs wait to start developing for up to a week until the hen regularly incubates them. This allows the chicks to hatch at close to the same, and you don’t have chicks strung out in age and size (they grow very fast,) that the hen has to care for. People regularly order fertile eggs through the mail that capitalize on this pause in development.
Somehow, we figured out how to breed them to produce nearly an egg a day for the first couple of years of their lives. A very useful trait. A few hens can keep a family of 4 in eggs for the year surviving just on food scraps and foraged food. Back before modern farming, eggs could be the majority of someone’s protein intake.
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