How do farmers control whether a chicken lays an eating egg or a reproductive egg and how can they tell which kind is laid?
In: Biology
Farmers try to control this by not allowing the chickens to mate except in specific circumstances, but this isn’t always a perfect process: preventing chickens from mating can be harder than you might think.
As a second line of defense, they use a technique called candling to detect embryos. This involves holding the egg up to a strong light and looking through it: it’s not *quite* as simple as the process you may have seen in cartoons, but it’s pretty close. It takes some skill to read what’s going on inside the egg, especially at early stages, but you can get a decent read on which eggs are fertilized and which are not.
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