Is there anything special about it’s egg laying habbits that made humans breed it specifically for eggs?
I know it has some weird mating attitude related to bamboo seed production and cycle. But I can’t find any resources online connecting the two.
I know humans eat a variety of eggs, but a chicken produces so much more than other types of fowl, and it is the main type of animal used for egg production.
In: Biology
To put simply, eggs are expensive to make. They take a lot of nutrients for a hen’s body to pit together and lay. Meaning that it’s advantageous to lay them when food is plentiful.
However, unlike most plants, Bamboo flowers and seeds very sporadically instead of anually, releasing nutrient-dense seeds every few years at minimum. This meant for the Junglefowel, they had to adapt to make the best use of the comparatively rare food source. Which in this case, meant laying eggs like crazy whenever they had enough food available to allow it.
Humans, being the inquisitive little monkeys we are, saw how the Red Junglefowel would lay tons of eggs whenever food was available and asked “Well what if food was always available?”. Turns out, the answer is that having food all the time means that the junglefowel’s egg-laying instincts are in overdrive all the time.
Thus, they where a prime candidate for domestication because they where already dispositioned for the mass-egg laying that people wanted.
From what I understand the birds had evolved to adapt to cycles with vast swings in availability of food.
In the area where they originally lived sometimes there was a whole lot food then normal and the birds evolved to take advantage of that by having as many offspring as possible while it lasted.
This meant there were lots of eggs there for people and other predators to collect during those times.
Humans figured out that if you kept these birds in captivity and fed them a whole lot all the time, their biology would get stuck in good times mode and they would keep laying enormous amounts of eggs all the time.
They were naturally evolved to be egg laying machines just with the addition of food all year round.
They were also edible when not laying eggs and not very good flyers and able to be kept in groups without murdering each other too much.
This made them much better than other types of birds, who are flying all over the place, don’t do well in groups and only lay a small clutch of eggs once a year or so.
So humans took these birds and started domesticating them and breed the good properties to be even better with natural selection.
This resulted in a chicken which was so good that humans spread them from south east Asia all the way to western Europe and much later across the world.
Modern chicken are specially bred as egg layers or roasters and don’t resemble their wild ancestors too much anymore.
Latest Answers