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Egg Mysteries

Ronson, that stuff about Egyptian incubation is very interesting and true.

What it does not add is that Egyptian breeds of chickens have been artificialy incubated for so long, they can no longer brood.
 
What came first - the Gecko or the Egg?

I found this article in today's "mx" - one of those free newspapers they hand out to train commuters:

geckoegg.jpg
 
Eggs!

Are there any farmers among us?

I visit my elderly aunt once a month, and we were discussing how you could keep chickens, and they would lay eggs without needing a cockerel.
I said I thought that hens -and budgies for that matter -could lay eggs on their own, but the eggs wouldn't be fertile.

BUT -said my aunt -she had always been told that the stringy bit you find in the white of an egg was the "cord", and I think I've always been told the same thing! How can the egg have an umbilical cord if it isn't fertile?

Many thanks in advance!
 
Even non-fertile eggs have the same basic structure as fertile ones.
The 'cord' is in fact just a tendon called a chalaza that keeps the yolk of the egg in position, and provides some protection against shocks, etc.
Occasionally (well, fairly rarely), virgin births are possible - it is entirely possible that an egg can become spontaneously fertile, so you don't always need a cockerel around.
 
Farmer finds egg inside another egg
A farmer cracked open a free range boiled egg for his breakfast, only to find another perfectly formed egg inside it.
Published: 7:00AM BST 01 Sep 2009

Jeff Taylor, 40, who runs Farmer Fred's Country Store in Ross-on-Wye, Herefords, with his wife Michelle, 44, was surprised to found the intact egg inside the larger four inch one.

"I have been farming all my life and I have never seen it before and neither has anyone else I have spoken to," said father-of-two Mr Taylor.

"They are both perfectly formed eggs, so we were really astonished when we saw it. I have seen double yolked eggs before but nothing like this.

"All the farmers we have asked just can't believe it when we show them. We looked on the internet and the last recorded tiny egg found inside a bigger egg was in Japan."

Douglas Russell, from the Natural History Museum, said it was "extremely rare" for a double egg to reach a customer.

Speaking in The New Scientist, he said: "As the curator of the British Natural History Museum egg collection, I've come across quite a few examples of egg oddities.

"Double eggs (as opposed to multiple-yolked eggs) are less common than some other zoological anomalies and consequently the ovum in ovo has attracted specific scholarly attention for hundreds of years.

"Several theories have been proposed for the origin of double eggs.

"The most likely suggests that the normal rhythmic muscular action, or peristalsis, that moves a developing egg down the oviduct malfunctions in some way."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... r-egg.html
 
I love the line in the gecko story that states, " . . . the egg which he bought in a normal supermarket . . . "

Not a Get Your Gecko Eggs Here Mart then!

Supermarket is very nearly an anagram of Turkey Sperm but I doubt if that is very significant either. :shock:
 
I was doing some baking the other day and found a freaky red stringy bit in one egg - different from the little sort of blood spot you get sometimes on the edge of the yoke. It was almost like a thin, centimetre-long bit of skin. As I said: freaky. I needed to use the egg so I quickly got rid of the strange bit and tried to pretend I hadn't seen it!
 
AFAIK, the red skinlike stuff in an egg is a more developed embryo than the blood spot. It's gross, but it's easier to fish out. And you hardly ever get it.
 
Hen lays monster egg - then dies
A farmer in New York state has revealed how a recently deceased hen left behind an impressive legacy - an egg weighing almost five ounces.
By Tom Leonard in New York
Published: 6:49AM BST 01 Oct 2009

Chris Schauerman, of Honeoye Falls, said he noticed one of his chickens appeared ill one day last week.

The hen, named Roberta, died later that night but not before it had laid six eggs, including one that was two and a half times the normal size.

"I just couldn't believe it. You open up the chicken coop, and sitting inside the nest with five other eggs is just this behemoth," said Mr Schauerman.

“I came up to the chicken and nudged her. She was barely able to pick up her head before it fell back down to the ground.”

The farmer is convinced that it was the effort of laying such a huge egg, which has been christened Little Roberta, that proved too much for the hen.

"We kind of related it to a woman having a 25-pound baby, if you do the math,” he said. “I'm pretty sure that's what eventually led to the death of the chicken."

Mr Schauerman said the egg will briefly be displayed to local schoolchildren before he makes it into an omelet.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... -dies.html
 
Rare footage of duckling twins hatching

Two ducklings have hatched from one egg on a duck farm near St Austell in Cornwall.

The Cornish Duck Company filmed the hatching after noticing that the egg had two embryos whilst checking for birth viability.

Local vet Barrie Fleming, who advised the farm's owners, Roger Olver and Tanya Dalton, on the hatching, said they had "every reason to be excited by the birth" as it was a very rare occurrence.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8323070.stm
 
Twin ducklings' DNA to be tested

[video]

Experts from the Natural History Museum in London are to carry out tests on an egg which produced twin ducklings in St Austell.

The babies, who are doing well, appeared from the same shell within minutes of each other on 22 October in a "rare" occurrence .

The museum wants to examine the egg to see how much calcium is inside.

They may also carryout DNA tests on the two ducklings to find out if they came from one embryo or two.

Roger Oliver, from the Cornish Duck Company in St Austell, said it was very rare for two ducks born from the same egg to thrive.

Apart from being much smaller than their brothers and sisters, they are perfectly healthy.

They have been named Romulus and Remus after the twins in Roman mythology.

He said: "It was a shock to say the least. They're looking pretty good, bearing in mind they were cooped up together in the same shell."

The ducks reared on the farm are destined for the dinner table, but Mr Oliver said these two will be spared to become pets. :D

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/8330924.stm
 
Woman's amazing 'a trillion to one' find: all eggs in box had 'double yolks'
A Cumbria woman, Fiona Exon, beat odds of more than a trillion to one by finding all six eggs in a single box had double yolks.
By Andrew Hough
Published: 7:30AM GMT 02 Feb 2010

She bought a half-dozen box from supermarket Morrisons and had been looking to scramble eggs one recent Sunday morning.

But after starting her preparation, she could only stare in amazement as every egg she cracked contained a double yolk.

The British Egg Information Service said the chances of getting one double yolk in a box of eggs was one in 1,000.

The chances of getting all six double yolks in one box, therefore, more than one in a trillion.

Mrs Exon, from Cumbria, said: "We bought a half dozen eggs from Morrisons and when I started to crack them to make scrambled eggs for a Sunday breakfast I was astounded when the first was a double-yolker.

"I had only ever seen one double-yolk egg before, and that was when I was young.

"Cracking the second I literally gasped when it too was a double."

She added: "When the third was the same I called my partner Hector through to the kitchen and when the fourth was a double, then the fifth we began to feel a little spooked.

"By the sixth double we were just gobsmacked. I had to get my camera and take a picture."

British Egg Information Service spokesman Kevin Coles said British people eat 11 billion eggs each year, or 30 million eggs a day.

Mr Coles said finding six double yolks in a half-dozen box of eggs was extremely rare.

"The chances of an egg coming out with a double yolk are 0.1 per cent," he said.

"It's extremely unusual to find all six eggs together in the one box having double yolks."

Mr Coles said double yolk eggs were common among younger hens, added: "When hens start laying eggs they often produce double eggs between 18 to 24 weeks.

"The double yolk eggs have probably come from the one flock of young hens."

Mr Coles said double yolk eggs were larger, so that explained why they would be grouped together.

Bookmakers William Hill said they were amazed at the find but would shirk taking a bet at odds of 1 trillion to one.

Spokesman Rupert Adams said: "We would never take a bet of six double yolk eggs in the one box at 1 trillion to one because if it did happen we would have egg on our face. 8)

"The highest odds we have given was a legitimate bet of 15 million to one for Gordon Brown to win the 100m sprint in the 2012 London Olympics.

"The only time we would take a bet for one trillion to one is for the end of the world and if that did happen obviously no one would be able to collect it. But in heaven everybody would be winners anyway."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... yolks.html
 
The British Egg Information Service said the chances of getting one double yolk in a box of eggs was one in 1,000.

The chances of getting all six double yolks in one box, therefore, more than one in a trillion.
Click to expand...
Brilliant story, but awful maths! The "one-in-a-trillion" claim rests on the premise that the chance of finding a second double-yolked egg is not dependent on having found a first one. On the contrary, I'd suggest that one's chance of finding another such egg, in a batch which already contains one, increases significantly.

Also, this article seems to be referring to the old "British" trillion, because 1000 to the power of 6 is 10^18, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which would now be called a quintillion, I believe.

Look at it this way - if every one of the 7 billion on Earth ate a pack of 6 eggs every day, that would be 2.5 x 10^12 boxes of eggs per year. It would take nearly 400,000 years for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 boxes of eggs to be eaten. Is the article really suggesting that what's just occurred is a once-in-a-half-million-year event (and even then, only in a world gone mad for eggs)? Surely not. Some other factor is at work here, I reckon.

Sorry - I've gone on a bit there...
 
I got six double-yolkers in a box a couple of years ago, I was mildly surprised but I assumed it was something to do with automatic sorting due to weight or size or something.

I didn't go to the bloody papers! :roll:
 
As I understand the egg production business, most eggs would be packaged with eggs from the same farm, and double-yolking (if there is such a term) can be a result of environment, or possibly genetics, or, to be honest, any number of factors that are likely to influence a large group of hens that are genetically closely related, living in the same environment, fed the same food, and (in all likelihood) mated to the same rooster.

So, the chances that, given one egg is a double-yolker, more than one from the same farm (if not the same hen), are substantially less than 1 in 10^18, as Peripart says above.

Must have been a slow news day.
 
Clucky find: Man lays claim to world's smallest chicken egg... and it's no bigger than a penny!
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 3:49 PM on 22nd August 2011

A West Virginia man is laying claim to one of the world's smallest chicken eggs. Whether it's a record remains to be seen.
The Reverand Donnie Russell said he found the egg last month on his farm.
It's 2.1 centimetres long, or a bit bigger than a penny, and weighs 3.46 grams - a little more than one-tenth of an ounce.

'It's really something. If you want to know the truth, I can't put it into words,' Mr Russell said.

Mr Russell, of Raleigh County, said his wife is an animal lover and she's collected cats, geese, ducks, chickens and other types of birds over the years.
Normally, the chicken eggs are donated to people from the Rock Creek Community Church, where Mr Russell is the pastor.
'Lo and behind, we went out and gathered these eggs. We had to do a double take. We both looked with our mouths open for about five minutes before we said a word. We said this has got to be a record.'

The chicken that he believes laid the egg is normal sized.
'When you see something like that, you wonder how in the world did that ever happen?' Mr Russell said. 'We're still taking it in.'
The state Department of Agriculture has certified the egg's size.

Guinness World Records lists the smallest recorded chicken egg as 2.7 centimetres, although a man from Great Britain in May claimed earlier this year to having one that was 2 millimetres smaller.

Mr Russell said he's still undecided whether to make an application with Guinness. He does plan to preserve the egg, which he's named the John Spencer Russell egg in honour of his two grandsons - John Kenny Russell and Spencer Matthew Russell.

State Agriculture Commissioner Gus Douglass said: 'West Virginia's hills are full of surprises - we have a little bit of everything, it seems. I'm very pleased that Rev Russell and others are keeping agriculture alive in the Mountain State, and that he takes obvious pride in being a West Virginia farmer.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1VroY647o
 
'Eggless' chick laid by hen in Sri Lanka

A Sri Lanka hen has given birth to a chick without an egg, in a new twist on the age-old question of whether the chicken or the egg came first.
Instead of passing out of the hen's body and being incubated outside, the egg was incubated in the hen for 21 days and then hatched inside the hen.
The chick is fully formed and healthy, although the mother has died.

The government veterinary officer in the area said he had never seen anything like it before.
PR Yapa, the chief veterinary officer of Welimada, where it took place, examined the hen's carcass.
He found that the fertilised egg had developed within the hen's reproductive system, but stayed inside the hen's body until it hatched.
A post-mortem conducted on the hen's body concluded that it died of internal wounds.

The BBC's Charles Haviland in Colombo says that the story has made headlines in Sri Lanka, with the Sri Lankan Daily Mirror's concluding: "The chicken came first; not the egg." :shock:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/17769677
 
Well, today I got four double yolk eggs in a row. Should I alert the media?
 
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