Scientists are worried about the gender orientation of chicken production

Russian industrialists want to know in advance whether a cockerel or hen will hatch from an egg before being sent to the incubator. Until recently, newborns with scallops were rejected and destroyed, excuse me, by suffocation with carbon dioxide. Specialists of the Siberian Federal Scientific Center for Agrobiotechnologies of the Russian Academy of Sciences are looking for a more humane approach to males, in particular, they have proposed a way to determine the gender of the future chicken long before it hatches, so that if it is sent to the scrap, then before the pain threshold appears.

Unlike the world of people, where some still dispute the difference in the potential of men and women, in the world of birds everything has long been clear. At least any farmer will say that when producing meat, a male is preferable, and when producing eggs … Well, I think no explanation is needed here. And for workers of poultry farms, laying hens are needed.

Until recently, on all poultry farms, the fate of day-old cockerels that were found in the egg-laying line was determined by conveyor workers – if they noticed the characteristic “genital tubercles”, they were thrown aside.

– The method of determining the already hatched cockerel eggs is not economical, – explains the chief researcher of the center Alexander Aleinikov. – Just imagine: the incubation period lasts 21 days – farmers raise future chickens, spending electricity, heat, and then some of them have to be culled.

Of course, scientists have long tried to determine the sex of the embryo before the release of the chicks from the egg. The research was based on the study of DNA in the blastoderm (the stage preceding the formation of the embryo. – Auth.), hormonal differences in the embryonic membrane. But these methods are rarely used in practice because they destroy the integrity of the egg structure. For example, to take bioassays for hormones, specialists need to burn a small hole in the shell with a laser and take a sample of the embryonic membrane with a syringe.

– The above methods are still applied very late, on the 10-15th day of the incubation period, when the embryo has already formed, says Aleinikov. “Although they say that embryos have no pain threshold, greens around the world are up in arms against such methods. Even if we assume that the males could go to the production of feed, there is a risk in this – at this stage of development, when in contact with the air, they can easily “catch” any infection and further pose a danger to fellow tribesmen.

Determination of the sex of the future bird – this is a very important issue that could significantly reduce the cost of producing chicken eggs. Despite its complexity, Siberian scientists still tried to solve it using the machine vision method.

We are talking about determining the sex of the future chicken by its blood vessels, which become visible to researchers as early as 3-5 days after incubation. The embryos of future males will still have to be destroyed, but much earlier. Savings in this case, according to scientists, is huge.

I am interested in Aleinikov, how does the machine vision system work when determining the sex of chickens?

“We use a high-resolution camera,” explains the scientist. – Shooting is done in different lighting, and then loaded into the computer. There, specially developed image processing algorithms are already connected to the case. They “see” the vessels of the future chicken, fix the heart rate, which, in theory, is different for “boys” and “girls” – we are now checking this fact.

But, as it turned out, the specialists of the Siberian center are not going to stop there either – in the future they want to develop a method of gender division that could be used before incubation. That is, a chicken laid an egg, and in a day or two it would be possible to determine its future sex, before laying it in an incubator. Then there would be no culling – the “male” eggs could be used for their intended purpose, like all ordinary chicken eggs that are sold in stores.

Alexander Fedorovich revealed a secret – the new method will be based on a whole range of egg parameters. One of them is form. Many housewives determine the future sex of a chicken precisely on this basis: they say that a pointed shape is typical for a cockerel, and a more rounded one for a hen. So the scientists decided to test this “method” in a scientific way. It can be supplemented with parameters such as mass, egg volume and many others – Aleinikov has not yet disclosed everything.