Eli5: Why do [most] chickens lay eggs everyday?
In: Biology
They are bred to lay eggs every 25-27 hours, this isn’t a natural cycle, but one they have evolved into due to domestication.
Most chickens don’t lay eggs everyday
But the chickens we have specifically selected for egg production lay eggs close to everyday and that’s why we use them for that.
The number of eggs per year per hen varies from breed to breed ranging from around 100 eggs to over 300 eggs per year. Obviously we selected the chickens that were more towards the 300 end of that range and then started breeding them to select for egg production. After a while you get chickens that can produce eggs almost as fast as physically possible but this wouldn’t normally happen in nature.
Broiler chickens are generally used for meat and get fat quickly which is what they were bred to do, their egg production is really low, like 1 egg every 3-4 days but that’s fine because we don’t use them for mass egg production, we use them for meat. These again normally wouldn’t happen in nature, but we’ve bred them for a specific set of characteristics to make our production system more efficient.
So the simple answer is that we have selectively bred chickens to lay eggs, and those breeds that are the best at laying eggs have become the most common and widely available.
However, there is another thing to consider. Chickens biilitically lay pretty large eggs, and it takes over a day on average to produce an egg. However, despite this, a chicken want to have a clutch (group) of eggs to lay on and hatch into a brood. So instead of laying 10 egga at once, chickens have evolved to lay one egg a day until they have the number they want, and then they will stop laying eggs and let the ones hatch like a normal bird.
However, in most farms, eggs are collected everyday, so a hen never has enough eggs at any one time to actually hatch. So each day, she sees her nest, sees that there are no eggs and lays one. We take the egg, and the chicken is back at square one.
In nature, or with wild chickens, they would not lay an egg every single day because no one would be taking the eggs.
They don’t. They lay an egg every few days. (Our 10 chicken average to about 2-3 eggs per day, industrial breeds might make more I guess)
And they have been bred to do so. They were domesticized thousands of years ago somewhere in asia, and then we also kept the ones who layed the most eggs wich slowly lead to these egg machines
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