Know if an egg is male or female?
Sabungeros have heard of ways of sexing eggs. The most popular myth is that round eggs are females and elongated eggs are males. This is only correct 50% of the times, since anyway the chances of an egg resulting in either a male or a female chick is fifty-fifty.
But here is a real very recent scientific development: The sex of embyo can now be determined.
Here’s the story:
New technique established
for sexing chick embryos
Male chicks are usually discarded, however a breakthrough method has been found that could spare male baby chicken the chop after hatching. The German scientist who came up with this system received a €30.000 prize for animal protection, sounds like a better option than culling. What do you think?
Maria-Elisabeth Krautwald-Junghanns, a veterinarian from Leipzig, discovered a way of determining the sex of chicken embryos while they are still in the egg. Since most poultry farms routinely kill male chicks – because they cannot lay eggs and because male fowl meat is not tasty – this will avoid unnecessary animal cruelty.
Study says chick embryos feel no pain at this stage of development
Discarding unhatched males still in the egg will have fewer ill effects. Embryos are unable to feel any pain at this stage of development, studies show. A touchy subject in Germany, where animal rights are a matter of hot debate and where the practice of chicken culling after hatching causes a lot of outrage.
Hence the decision of Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University to award the biannual €30,000 Felix Wankel animal protection prize to the Leipzig professor. (Source: Mail & Guardian)
In-ovo Sex Determination
The joint research project for spectroscopic sex determination in the egg at the universities of Leipzig and Dresden is now well underway.
Project co-ordinator, Professor Maria Kraulwald-Junghanns, explained: "The aim of the project was to explore alternatives to the killing of male chicks of layer lines, so that the hatching and therefore the killing of male chicks is prevented from the outset.
"The most difficult stage was to identify a suitable method but we have now achieved that."
Professor Kraulwald-Junghanns has recently been honoured for her commitment to animal welfare by receiving the Felix Wankel Animal Protection Research Award.
The method for sex determination in the egg uses near-infrared Raman spectroscopy (NIR), which has the advantage of being able to test fertilised embryonated chicken eggs after about 72 hours, she explained.
The next steps are to optimise and then automate the NIR method, as well as to ensure that the female embryos are not harmed by the process.
After that, commercial enterprises will need to invest in the development of standard devices and use them.
Method of Sex Determination Three Days after Incubation
The new spectroscopic sex determination method makes use of the different size of the sex chromosomes of male and female chickens advantage.
After three days of incubation, the embryos develop small blood vessels, which can be used to distinguish male and female embryos.
Firstly, a laser is used to make a microscopic hole in the shell of each egg. Then Raman spectroscopy - in the near infrared wavelength range - is used to send light into the egg contents. Analysis of the light scatter pattern from the blood cells of the embryo can identify the embryo as male or female.
The hole in the shell is then sealed again. The female embryos can be incubated as normal, while the "male" eggs can be used in a number of industrial processes, including animal feed and the chemical industry.
Among the advantages of the method is that it is contactless, thus eliminating the need to clean and disinfection or replace any parts between measurements and keeping running costs low.
Sexing currently takes about 15 to 20 seconds per egg but improvements could realistically be made to reduce it to less than 10 seconds. (The Poultr Site)
Related story: A new new device is an oestrogen sniffer. It relies on the fact that female embryos produce this hormone in quantity and male ones do not. The sensor uses a fine needle to penetrate both the shell and the allantoic sac of an egg. This sac is a fluid-filled membrane that cushions the embryo and helps it trade carbon dioxide for oxygen from the air. (It is also the membrane that can make peeling a hard-boiled egg such a frustrating affair.)The fluid sample thus extracted is mixed with genetically engineered yeast cells that fluoresce in the presence of oestrogen.
The light so generated is recorded by a camera linked to a computer that keeps track of where the egg that produced the sample is now stored. Initial experiments, reported recently in the Journal of Animal Science, show that the process does not affect the hatchability of tested eggs, and appears to be virtually foolproof, if rather long-winded (the results are available only after two hours).
In future, Dr Butt envisages, the egg-sorting operation of a large hatchery might look like this: A conveyor belt moves the eggs along, gently jostling them until their allantoic sacs point upright. They then pass beneath an array of needles, which draw fluid from each. That done, they are sorted into bar-coded trays
Two hours later, once the samples have been analysed and the sex of each egg determined, they are returned to a sorter and divided by sex. The unfortunate male embryos then end up as pet food while the females go on to their lives as egg-mothers.It would require some engineering (and a significant amount of storage space) to incorporate such a system into a hatchery. But the tweaks on the actual production line would be relatively minor, according to Dr Butt, and could be incorporated into the existing systems of robotic injectors used to pump vaccines into unhatched eggs.
Dr Butt reckons the cost of his system would be two or three cents per egg. The savings in labour, and in the cost of feeding and vaccinating cocks that slip through the existing procedures, should outweigh this. Sad for the redundant sexers, of course. But, as the adage has it, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. (Economist)
