Perhaps you’ve heard the old wive’s tale that
you can determine the eventual sex of a chick by looking at the shape
of the egg? A quick search of the internet will turn up
testimonials from dozens of chicken-keepers who are absolutely certain
that this method of sexing chicks works. Here’s one
representative sample from Chicken
Keeping Secrets:
placed in an incubator. Several years ago I was told that the more
pointed eggs would be roosters and the more rounded eggs would be hens.
So I decided to do an experiment. I set 24 eggs in an incubator and
hatched 20 of those eggs and they were all roosters except one. I
currently try to use only the more rounded eggs for hatching and have
about 75 % hens. This does not appear to be true for all breeds of
chickens but does seem to work for the large breeds but not as well on
bantams.” ~ Thanks, Donald R. Holbrook
I decided to dig a little deeper, and stumbled across this line from The History of Animals
by Aristotle:
rounded at the narrow end, are male.”
It looks like the tale goes back to the fourth century BC…although
egg shape had the opposite meaning back then. Does that make it
an old philosopher’s tale?
Despite what Aristotle thought, modern scientists poo-poo the notion
that egg shape is an indicator of chick sex. After all, if egg
shape had any effect on sex, wouldn’t hatcheries incubate all female
eggs rather than risking public outrage by euthanizing unwanted
males? The scientific literature suggests that egg shape is breed
specific, inherited from the hen’s father, and may vary
seasonally. So don’t choose only round eggs to put in your
incubator and assume you won’t end up with a rooster — chances are
that 50% of those eggs will hatch into males.
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I can’t see the exact statement made, so I’m quoting as a similar phrase; “after all wouldn’t commercial hatcheries use this”. The technology for using this method is patented.
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7167579/claims.html
The patent expires in 2022.
Additionally, I struggle with generalizations such as; scientists don’t validate this. What scientists? What published research based study did the scientist use to make this determination?
tbeck — Thanks for sharing! Unfortunately, just because something has been patented, doesn’t mean it works…
Just thinking through the biology, it would be hard to see how egg shape could be linked to the sex of the chick. Since the mother hen makes the egg shells around the embryo, she would somehow have to *know* the sex of her offspring, which seems highly unlikely.
By your statement the hen would have to know the sex of the chick before she made the egg around it is silly. She doesn’t intentionally form the egg. No more than a woman intentionally grows a placenta around the cold growing in her womb.