When you kill a chicken are the unlaid eggs round?
How many are there growing at once? Are a couple on deck in decreasing sizes?
The eggs are the shape you see in the carton.
Don’t know.
There are eggs forming behind the ones that are ready to be laid. You get multiple eggs a day from a chicken.
The Master speaks: Which end of the egg comes out of the chicken first?:
FWIW, Andrew Zimmern ate unlaid eggs out of a slaughtered chicken(before the shell was formed, looked pretty much like just the yolks) in one of his Bizarre Foods episodes in Taiwan.
When I was a kid in the 50s, we used to get whole chickens. The feathers were plucked, but other than that they were intact. There were always several eggs inside, some of them completely formed and ready to be laid. The shapes were the same as eggs that have been laid. There were also younger eggs that were basically just the yolk. My mother used to add these eggs to her chicken soup.
As others have said, the eggs form in their egg shape, initially traveling down the reproductive tract small end first, then out big end first. The egg makes that flip so that when the chicken squeezes down with her uterine muscles on the small end, the egg will be pushed outwards. Exactly what movements the egg goes through as it travels down the reproductive tract is startlingly precise and eerily well-studied.
When a chicken ovulates, she ovulates the whole yolk of an egg (as opposed to mammals, who ovulate a microscopic thing). So, the active ovary of a hen looks like a cluster of yellow grapes, with hundreds of forming yolks in different sizes. When an egg-type breed of hen is in full production, her ovary and reproductive tract will make up 1/4th of her total body weight. If you’d like to try eating a chicken ovary, they aren’t hard to find. Just shop at any non-western market.
Harmonious Discord: unless you have an exceptional chicken, you won’t get more than one egg a day. The hormones for ovulation are day-length triggered, and require a certain number of hours of light and dark before they can cycle again and cause another ovulation. There are hormonal mechanisms in place, just like in mammals, to allow only one follicle at a time to be recruited for ovulation. You can sometimes get ovulation of 2 yolks at once if two follicles are ready when the hormones spike, like maternal twinning in humans. But, when this happens in chickens, the yolks will travel down the reproductive tract together and get stuffed into the same shell. They are called Double-yolked eggs. If you somehow got ovulation of multiple yolks far enough apart to not result in double yolked eggs, but close enough together to produce multiple eggs in one day, you run into a raw materials problem: even on supplemented diets, chickens can only mobilize so much calcium per day to make the egg shells. Your first egg might come out ok, but any subsequent ones will only have partially solidified shells.
Cheers,
Pullet, SDMB Poultry Veterinarian
Yes I should have said can get instead of get.