Can someone please explain chicken eggs to me? What is the difference between the ones we eat vs the ones that hatch 🐣? Do chickens get pregnant? How do they lay eggs all the time ?
In: Biology
Chickens lay eggs all the time. The ones that hatch were fertilized by a rooster, the ones that don’t, weren’t.
If you look closely at a chicken egg, there’s a little white squiggly bit on the yolk. That’s the actual egg cell, which develops into a chick. The yolk is the food for that chick, and the egg white is there to suspend it all in the egg.
If we compare this to a human’s reproductive system, a woman enters ovulation, an egg is released. 12-24 hours later, if it isn’t fertilized, it will simply die and eventually fall out. About 2 weeks later, if the body doesn’t have a fertilized egg implanted into the uterine wall, the uterine wall is shed away with blood as a period. If the egg is fertilized, it can survive 6-10 days before implanting into the uterine wall and eventually developing into a fetus.
Now, back to a chicken. It’s a similar idea, except domesticated chickens can lay and egg every day if they’re not brooding.
The egg cell is released, and a yolk is developed, and regardless of whether or not it’s fertilized, a shell is formed around it and it is passed through the cloaca, and an egg is laid.
If the egg is fertilized, it can develop and start eating the yolk until it is mature enough to hatch.
Brooding happens if a chicken is allowed to sit on eggs for too long. The chicken’s hormones switch off egg production so the chicken can save energy and incubate already laid eggs. The chicken cannot tell if those eggs are fertilized or not for a while. Once the chicks are able to move around inside the egg, they can tell, and the chicken will break and eat any eggs with no signs of movement to regain the nutrients.
If you’re farming eggs, and a chicken starts brooding, you should separate them from the other chickens (so she doesn’t sit on their eggs) and after a few days the chicken should go back to laying.
If you’re breeding chickens, you can just let nature take its course (if you own a rooster)
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