Eli5: Why do [most] chickens lay eggs everyday?
In: Biology
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.
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