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.
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