How can chickens lay eggs everyday? If it’s without the use of a rooster, then what is the function of a rooster?
Heh heh, city folks!
Not all eggs are fertile. Chickens are perfectly capable of laying un-fertilized eggs. Any eggs you purchase in a store are almost certainly un-fertilized, in fact the hens probably have never seen a rooster.
It does take a rooster to fertilize an egg so that it can hatch into a chick.
By the way chickens don’t lay an egg every day.
Didja ever wonder where chocolate milk comes from?
::Brown cows of course::
IIRC from my Animal Production Systems course (yes, I took one of those before changing majors…) the chickens probably HAVE seen roosters, and quite often. In an all female environment, there would probably be a lack of need for eggs. We visited an experimental farm and the free-range birds were in enclosures of approximately 10 females to every male, and the fact is, some of your breakfast eggs may be fertilised. The difference is not specifically whether it’s fertilised or not, but also whether it’s been incubated. A fertilised egg will NOT develop into a chick unless it is incubated almost immediately, and kept at the appropriate temperature for the the duration of the development process. Since eggs for consumption are collected from the hens every day, there is no “risk” of taking a half-developed egg.
Also, FYI, any egg layed on the ground (or any place where the chickens actually move around in) is discarded, and only those layed in the “nests” are sold. This is because the shell is porous, and exposure to feces or other bacteria increases the likelihood of infected eggs.
The roosters are fed on a different diet than the hens, to keep the females at optimum production, and the males at just enough to “stimulate” the females into generating eggs. This is done simly by having a grating over the feed boxes in such a way that the males (larger, with bigger heads) can only get to a certain amount of food, and the females can get to the rest.
I don’t remember anything about caged chickens and their production system, except for the following:
Chickens (and other birds) fertility is light-mediated. Keep a chicken in an environment with a specific amount of daylight vs darkness (12:12hrs, ,4:4:4:4:4:4 etc), and that cycle will become their “day” and they may in fact produce an egg per 24hr day, or every two days.
That’s about all I remember, and some of it may be a bit off, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
My experience with confined chicken egg production is very limited…I’ve only been through one. There was not a rooster in the facility. In fact the containerized chickens were hatched and shipped to the egg producer.
Obviously, free range chickens often have a rooster or two in the flock, not only for egg fertilization but for protection of the hens.
I still contend that the average eggs you purchase in stores are un-fertilized because the vast majority of eggs sold, are not raised free range. If you do find fertilized eggs, they generally are marked as such and command a higher price.
We live on a rural road that goes to a campground. I got home from work one day and my wife mentioned a camper stopping by to try and purchase a free range chicken, the first time we had heard of such a term.
Then there was the time when she heard a vehicle stop down the road and went out to investigate only to find a camper coming out of the woods with her horny old tom turkey by the neck. The shocked camper knew he’d been had and was really suprised when when she applauded his capture. The thing would always get aroused when she would go out to feed the rest of the birds, it would turn all blue, puff out its feathers and strutt around her feet just long enough to get in the mood to jump her.
http://www.poultry.org/eggs.htm
If you like eggs, don’t read the above link.
I looked it up mnemosyne because I doubted your contention about the possibility of multiple eggs per day.
Don’t knowhow often a chicken lay eggs. But it can certainly lay them without a rooster, in the same way a woman don’t need a man to ovulate each month. And one of the main use of a rooster is the identical to the main use of human males : fertilize the eggs in order they’ll devellop in a chick/baby.
bare: well, maybe not multiple eggs a day, but several a week, that’s for sure. I don’t have any of my notes for that class anymore, so I was only going by memory, but I did remember some prety high numbers in terms of eggs/year.
Also, they can’t sell fertilised eggs for more than non-fertilised, simply because there is absolutely no way to tell which is which without cracking the shell. AFAIK, and according to my prof, who specialised in poultry production, the only way to tell if an egg is fertilised is by looking at the yolk. If it is, then there would be a small, ring-like structure on the yolk. So obviously, if you find a fertilised egg, these aren’t going to sell for much :). Free-range eggs, however, do sell for a lot more than confined ones.