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
Just to address the ” how do they lay eggs all the time?” part. Chickens evolved from a wild bird species that lives in Southeast Asia, in places with a lot of bamboo forests. Bamboo forests will produce a whole bunch of seeds all at once, but only every few years. The wild proto chicken evolved reproductive cycles to take advantage of this. Basically they have a little genetic switch inside them, and if they have access to a bunch of food for long enough the switch flips, And they go into crazy egg laying mode. Their body just constantly starts producing as many eggs as it can as often as it can. The idea was that when food was scarce they wouldn’t have many babies and population might dwindle, but every few years when they had TONS of food they took advantage of it and made tons of babies. Humans observed this behavior and figured out how to take advantage of it. If we give chickens a nice place to live and enough food, we can trick them into flipping that switch and making a bunch of eggs (in chicken farming they call this going “on brood” or “going broody”).And if we then keep the roosters from being able to access the female chickens, we can make sure all of those eggs are unfertilized for us to eat. So just like we saw wolves’ ability to hunt in a coordinated fashion and said “ohhhh, I can DO something with that!” And turned them into dogs, we saw Red Jungle Fowl’s ability to make a TON of eggs when the conditions are right and turned them into chickens.
Latest Answers