Birth: how do chicks hatch? How does a chicken appear? Where do the chickens come from?

During the period of reaching puberty, the eggs mature. After the rupture of the membrane covering them, they enter the protein part of the oviduct, where the formation of the egg white and its membranes occurs, and then into the uterus, where the shell is formed. The duration of egg formation ranges from 23 to 26 hours. Spermatozoa can maintain their fertilizing ability for a long time (up to 20 days), being in the folds of the oviduct mucosa. Therefore, one mating with a male is enough for the laying hen to lay fertilized eggs for a long time.

A constant metabolism takes place between the embryo, yolk, protein and shell. The embryo uses the nutrients of the egg, excretes metabolic products, breathes, absorbs and releases heat energy.

At the beginning of incubation, the embryo does not yet have a constant body temperature. It is the same as that of the air surrounding the egg. In the second half of incubation, some features of a warm-blooded animal appear in the embryo. The temperature inside the egg becomes higher than the ambient temperature, reaching 40-42 ° С, i.e. the body temperature of the bird.

With the development of the musculature and nervous system, the embryo acquires the ability to move freely. They are already noticeable by the tenth day of incubation. The embryo moves its limbs and neck, lowers and raises its head.

By the end of incubation, the chick occupies almost the entire egg. It lies with its tail at the sharp end of the egg with legs pressed to the stomach, and its head to the air chamber.

His neck is bent, so that his head is covered by the right wing, and only the beak sticks out from under it. Protein and amniotic fluid by this time have been completely absorbed, and allantoic fluid has evaporated. The yolk, which has already become thick, is drawn into the abdominal cavity of the chicken together with the yolk sac.

Respiration rate increases with the age of the embryo. If for two days of incubation the chicken embryo absorbs about 4 cm3 of oxygen, then on the fifth - 16, on the tenth - 70, on the fourteenth - 270, on the nineteenth - 536 cm3. In total, each chicken egg uses about 4 liters of oxygen during incubation and releases 3 liters of carbon dioxide. After birth, male chicks breathe 18-21 times per minute, female chicks 31-37 times, provided that they are not under stress.

After hatching, the chickens lie for a long time to rest, as they spend a lot of energy breaking the shell.
The body temperature of young animals at this age depends on its level in the environment. In day-old chicks, heat transfer is higher than heat production. Chicks are very sensitive to drafts as they create a cold effect and can cause hypothermia. The complete formation of thermoregulatory mechanisms in young animals depends on the final formation of juvenile plumage, which ends at 60-90 days of age.

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The birth of a new life is an incredible and touching moment. How nice to watch when chicken eggs turn into the cutest yellow lumps. Surely even seasoned breeders cannot help but be touched by a newly hatched chicken. Let's live this touching moment together, find out how chickens hatch - videos and photos will help us with this!

Signs of impending hatching

Your babies can be born both traditionally - from under a hen, and through an incubator. In any case, it is necessary to control the incubation process, but in the incubator this, of course, is done more carefully. To be sure that your eggs will definitely produce a brood, they must be 100% fertilized and of high quality. Suppose you laid good eggs, the conditions in the incubator were correct, and how can you understand that the chick will soon be born? The incubation period for a chicken egg is 21 days.

Three days before the expected birthday of the chicks, you need to stop turning the eggs in the incubator and monitor them closely. In the egg, which will soon become a chicken, you can hear the characteristic tapping of its beak - this is a small bird asking for freedom. Sometimes you can even hear very quiet squeaks, such signs of life begin to appear as early as 17-19 days. After tapping, there is a turn of biting - if you see a small hole in the shell, do not rush to "help" the bird to get out. The first video showing us the process of hatching a chick, see below.

Sometimes it takes several hours from the moment of pecking to complete hatching of the bird. The main thing is to periodically pay attention to such an egg with a peck, sometimes the bird still needs help, otherwise the chicken may suffocate and die in its shell.

Hatching process

If your chicks have to hatch in the nest, from under the hen, then she usually monitors and controls the entire process. However, you should not completely trust his bird, sometimes you come across negligent mothers who can ask a newborn baby with their mass. But then you can see an unusually touching video starring a caring mother hen and newborn chickens!

So, the process of hatching chicks goes like this:

First, a small crack appears on the shell, which turns into a small hole within a few hours.
Further, the small chicken rotates in the egg and, with the help of the formation he has called the "egg tooth", splits the shell around the circumference. It should be noted that during incubation, the shell becomes thinner and becomes very fragile; it usually takes a chick from 6 to 12 hours to break the shell. While the chicken fights with the egg shell, freeing its way to freedom, the brood hen makes specific calling sounds.
It happens that the chick weakens ahead of time and can no longer fight the shell, in which case either a mother hen or a person comes to his aid. Unfortunately, the mortality rate among chicks that require assistance at the stage of hatching is higher than among all others.

Another video about the birth of chicken chicks for your attention further!

Further, shortly before the full exit of the nestling from the shell, it absorbs the residual contents of the yolk sac - this is the energy reserve for the bird for the first hours of life.

Chick completely freed from its shell is exhausted, weak and completely wet. It takes him a couple of hours to dry up, "gather strength" and appear before us in all its glory - a yellow squeaking lump!

Video "How chicks are born"

And at the end of our acquaintance with newborn chicks, a video showing the first hours of the life of little chicks! It is worth noting that a lot of videos on the Internet are devoted to this topic!

All stages of chick development, 21 days in 2 minutes

Which came first - a chicken or an egg? The scientific answer to this question

Of course, the chicken. This is quite obvious, since for offspring to appear, a parent must appear. The answer to this question is in the Bible, and recently science has finally managed to convincingly prove this fact.

Chicken ovaries produce a protein called Ovocleidin-17. Using a computer, scientists studied in detail the formation of the shell and came to the conclusion that this particular protein plays a key role in this process. The shell of a chicken egg is 90% calcium carbonate, and contains a lot of trace elements: copper, fluorine, iron, manganese, molybdenum, phosphorus, sulfur, zinc, silicon and others, but the chicken gets all this from food. But Ovocleidin-17 is produced only by the chicken itself, therefore, in order for an egg to appear, it is absolutely necessary.

Of course, the question “What appeared before? ..” is rather philosophical and rhetorical, but now we have a scientifically substantiated answer to it.

Several common myths about chicken eggs:

The egg is easier to peel off if you pour cold water over it. This is the wrong conclusion: the ease of cleaning does not depend on the cooling of the boiled egg, but on its age. One- and two-week-old eggs are the easiest to clean, and fresh ones are the most problematic.

Fresh eggs are the tastiest. This is not true. According to experts, eggs need three to eight days to mature. Only after that their aroma is fully revealed.

Bio-egg yolk is more yellow. This is not true. The intensity of the yolk color is not determined by whether the chicken walks freely on the grass or is forced to live in a cage. The color of the yolk depends entirely on the feed. Therefore, carotenoids are often added to the feed for chickens living in cages, which enhance the color of the yolk, which is prohibited in the case of environmentally friendly eggs.

The variegated hens lay brown eggs. This is not always true. The determining factor for shell color is not color, but genes. If we talk about a purebred bird, then chickens with white earlobes lay white eggs, and with red earlobes, on the contrary, brown. However, it is unambiguous that every hen lays eggs with the same shell color throughout its life.

Everyone knows that birds have no teeth. But a long time ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, birds had teeth. They lost their teeth long ago, but a new study on the mutation of the talpid2 gene in chickens has shown that they still have the genes for tooth growth.
Biologist Matthew Harris of the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany, investigated a mutation in this gene. He was interested in what influences the development of organs in chick embryos. Harris made an accidental discovery that chickens could grow teeth: he examined the head of a 16-day-old chick embryo that had been accidentally mutated and noticed tiny protrusions on the edge of its beak.

Scientists have long known about the deadly recessive gene, talpid2, but have never suggested a relationship between the gene and the formation of teeth, because mutated embryos do not survive to emerge from the egg - the maturation period usually lasts 21 days. Nevertheless, scientists managed to incubate them for up to 18 days, and during the last 24 hours of these 18 tiny teeth began to grow, which birds have been deprived of for several million years.
The teeth, although small, had a conical shape - this can be seen in the mouths of crocodiles or ancient fossilized birds. The earliest known ancestors of birds were called archosaurs - they had mouth and teeth very similar to crocodiles. The similarities are unsurprising as birds are much more closely related to reptiles than mammals. Over time, the development of the beak led to the fact that the birds lost their teeth and began to look like modern birds that are familiar to us.
It is surprising that the mutant chicks still retain the genes responsible for the formation of teeth, since the birds lost their teeth about 70-80 million years ago. Harris and his colleague John Fallon of the University of Wisconsin decided to continue their research and find out if this gene is preserved in healthy chickens.
The activated talpid2 gene in healthy chick embryos also led to the formation of teeth in chickens - they developed the same "reptile" teeth and other similar genetic traits. The success of the experiment not only confirmed the hypothesis of the presence of teeth in ancient birds, but also proved that the formation of teeth in mutant chickens was not just an accidental one-time mutation.

Chickens laying blue eggs

If you ask someone what color chicken eggs are, they will tell you two options: brown and white, and they will be completely right - most of these poultry lay eggs with these eggs, but there are exceptions to the rule.
Some breeds, namely Araucana, Dongxiang and Lushi, differ from other representatives of the domestic chicken species: their eggs are pronounced bluish-blue.
Araucana chickens appeared in the mountainous regions of Chile and got their name from the Indian tribe of the same name, which was engaged in breeding them. Later, chickens spread to North America, where they became known under the name Mapuche. The first mention of chickens laying blue eggs dates back to 1526. Dongxiang and Lushi chickens are native to China, where they have been bred for over 500 years. What made some chickens change their usual egg color a long time ago?

Scientists have found that the culprit is a mutation in the SLCO1B3 gene, which is responsible for the production of one of the coloring pigments contained in eggshells - bilirubin. Long ago, the ancestors of modern chickens were infected with the endogenous retrovirus EAV-HP, which introduced its genetic material into the DNA of healthy cells, resulting in an excess of bilirubin and, as a result, the blue color of eggs.
The araucana mutation is different from the abnormalities in the genome of Chinese chickens, suggesting that they are caused by two different outbreaks of retrovirus. I must say that the changes in the body, provoked by the virus, do not pose any danger to birds, as well as to the person who eats them, therefore the blue eggs of these breeds are now in high demand, because they have a delicate and exquisite taste.
In recent years, tailless chicken has returned to hobbyist farms.

Israeli scientists have managed to breed completely bald chickens.

The look of the bird is creepy, but the invention also has positive points, now the path of the chicken from the hen house to the hostess's pan has become shorter.

Practical breeders have developed a new breed of chicken in Israel that has neither down nor feathers. This achievement belongs to Professor Avigdor Kohaner, who works at the Hebrew University in the Faculty of Agricultural Genetics. After spending a quarter of a century on genetic experiments, he raised chickens without feathers.
The Greens were outraged. But the professor argued the need for such poultry because of the Israeli heat, in which thousands of birds die on farms in desert areas in summer. Meat chickens eat a lot, so they are much hotter than ordinary chickens. Their own temperature is 42 degrees, outside at this time of the year is not at all lower. In the absence of powerful air conditioners, a cover of feathers and down only contributes to overheating. The rabbis, however, hint that this chicken is not exactly kosher.

Science does not consider such a mutation to be a disease. These chickens are quite healthy, like, for example, albino animals. At the Faculty of Genetics, they are experimenting: scientists weigh birds, measure offspring and absolutely naked pairs, and mixed ones. Of course, all of them are fertilized artificially, constantly observing the population and development of chickens. According to Alon Iger, assistant professor Kohaner, there is no difference between the two.

Now all that remains is to prove to animal advocates that experiments to create naked chickens are not a mockery of them, but to the rabbis - that the new breed is completely kosher.

Which modern animal has the longest tail?

Which modern animal has the longest tail: a monkey, a crocodile or a peacock? No, the most tailed animal on Earth is ... a chicken.

Long-tailed chickens can only be seen in the small Japanese village of Katho, located twenty kilometers from the city of Kochi on the island of Shikoku.

270 years ago, this breed was bred by the peasant Rizae-mon Takeichi. In those days, local feudal lords loved to surround themselves with a magnificent retinue and squires. The spear shafts of the squires of the solemn processions were adorned with long bird feathers.

Breeding long-tailed chickens has become a tradition in this Japanese village. The longest tail of the light-lilac breed, which also holds the "record" - 7 meters 30 centimeters.

Raising chickens yourself is a profitable business. If used for laying hens, it is better to take young hens. Many farmers use the incubation method for hatching chicks. To get a good result, you need to know how the incubation process takes place, and after how many days the chicks hatch.

The chick formation process is divided into three stages:

Laying of organs of the embryo, head, tissues. There is an active metabolism, at the first stage it is important to ensure a comfortable stay.
Lasts 15 days - the growth and development of the chick follows. Excess liquid disappears from the egg. It is important not to allow overheating during this period of time in order to avoid the birth of weakened chicks. To maintain the required moisture level, you can spray the future brood with liquid.
The last day before hatching. The contents of the egg - the white and the yolk, have already been consumed by the chick, so it tends to be born. For a quick process, you need to provide heat in the incubator.

Hatching

Subject to the conditions of keeping in the equipment and normal incubation of the hen, the chicks hatch after 2.5–3 weeks. With the onset of 21 days, the chicks begin to peck from the inside of the shell with the help of an "egg tooth".

Process:

A crack forms on the egg. If you put it on your palm, bring it to your ear, you can clearly hear the chick scratching itself. It rotates inside the egg, as a result, the crack gradually enlarges.
A small hole is formed, and the baby, making the last effort, splits the shell into two parts and is born. Chickens hatch for a long time, the process can take a day.
After birth, the chick is wet, it needs to dry out - this will take up to 2 hours. The hatched babies are separated after drying, they are given to drink and eat.

Do i need help

Hatching is a natural process, but inexperienced breeders often try to help.

Assistance rules:

When incubating with a brood hen, it is better to wait for the chick to emerge independently, since before the final hatching, the circulatory system has not yet been fully formed.
It is not necessary to pull out the feathered, destroying the shell can damage the vessels. This will weaken the chicken and lead to death. When brooding chicks, minimum human intervention is required during the hatching period. You just need to control so that the chicken does not crush the hatched chicks.
If the eggs are in the incubator, the farmer oversees the process. But it is important to ensure a normal climate in the apparatus. Before you start, you need to sprinkle the eggs with warm water, which will make the shell softer. Then the chickens can easily destroy it.

Breeding methods

When buying chicks, it is not always possible to form the correct flock. Many sellers sell young cockerels under the guise of chickens. Therefore, if you already have a good breed, you can start growing yourself. The process is easy, but requires certain skills and knowledge.

Brooding hen

How many days does it take for chicks to hatch under a hen? The process takes approximately 3 weeks without human intervention. Sometimes chicks may hatch a little earlier or later.

The main task is to put fertilized eggs under the hen. The rest of the process is controlled by the laying hen, and after 21 days squeaking chicks are born. If the chick does not appear, the egg may not have been fertilized.

Features:

In the process of incubation, the chicken gets out of the nest every day - this is the norm. She needs to eat and drink water. Periodically, the hen turns the eggs over so that they warm up evenly. When the embryo freezes, the chicken feels it, throws it aside.
To prevent the laying hen from leaving the nest, eggs must not be taken. It is necessary to provide her with comfort, a dark, quiet place is perfect.

Incubator

If everything is simple with a hen, then in the case of using special equipment, the process requires constant human participation. On what day the chicks hatch in the incubator depends on the conditions created.

Microclimate is of great importance for the timely hatching of chicks. In the absence of the necessary heat, the chickens may die altogether.

Temperature regime

Some incubators are equipped with an automatic egg-turning system. If there is no such function, you need to do it yourself, otherwise the brood will not appear.

The risk of death exists even at high temperatures. But if the heat is not enough, the chickens develop slowly and are born weak, sometimes they do not even have enough strength to get out of the shell.

With a lack of heat, they can hatch later, on days 22–25, if there is no chick after this period, there is no point in waiting.

Humidity

The climate in an incubator is very important for successful hatching. The air condition plays a special role. The rate of birth of chicks and the hardness of the shell depend on the level of humidity. In dry air, it becomes too hard.

It is possible to determine the imminent hatching by hearing characteristic sounds - rustling, faint knocking, squeak. Such manifestations indicate that he is alive and will soon get out of the shell. You can find out the time of the appearance of chicks by calculating the days, while you need to control the microclimate in the incubator.

Important: 48 hours before the expected hatching, you should stop turning, you should start sprinkling the eggs with warm water twice a day, which will help soften the shell.

What breeds are grown in an incubator?

It is possible to raise chickens in artificial conditions of both meat and egg breeds, popular types:

Brahma;
Broilers KOBB-500;
Master Gray;
Kuchinskaya Jubilee.

How to get healthy chicks in an incubator?

A common problem is the lack of vitality of part or all of the masonry. The main reason for the poor result is the infertility of the eggs. This is possible with the failure of the rooster, which needs to be replaced.

Careful attention to the process will allow you to get large and healthy offspring when raising chickens through incubation.

Also, the cause of marriage can be infection of eggs before laying with fungi and bacteria. This happens when sanitary conditions are not observed in storage.

It is important to take those eggs that are in the nest.

Preparation before laying plays a huge role:

They should be preheated for 8-10 hours at room temperature. Then, when moving into heat, condensation will not form on the surface. If, nevertheless, a liquid is formed, a blockage of the pores of the egg is obtained, the embryos die from a lack of oxygen.
It is important to ensure normal air circulation, if necessary, the incubator should be ventilated.
Maintain a constant temperature throughout the entire period, creating conditions as close to natural as possible.
Turn eggs 1-2 times a day.

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