Does egg shape determine gender?

[everyday_farmlife]

Hi there, I heard something interesting today and wondered if anyone else has heard/tried it... apparently if you select round eggs to hatch you get hens and pointy eggs are roosters. I have no idea if this is true or not but hey it's worth a try.

 

[BelovedBirds]

Hi there, I heard something interesting today and wondered if anyone else has heard/tried it... apparently if you select round eggs to hatch you get hens and pointy eggs are roosters. I have no idea if this is true or not but hey it's worth a try.

For sure its worth a shot, but I doubt there's much truth to this. I heard it too, and though its a bit of an old wives tale, I'd heard of it being fairly accurate for some people. I don't see how the shape of an egg could possibly indicate anything to do with gender, personally.
I can't comment on it with chicken eggs, but one of my duck eggs was pointy ish and one was very round- both hatched females!

So, you could try it, but I definitely would not count on it at all!

 

[Tre3hugger]

nope

 

[Ridgerunner]

That's been around a long time. One of the ancient Greeks wrote about it, I believe it was Aristotle, though he thought the pointy eggs were pullets and the round eggs were cockerels. Exactly opposite to today's wisdom. It's so simple you wonder why the commercial hatcheries don't use it, that would be worth a lot of money to them. They must be stupid to not do something so simple to greatly improve their profits.

I totally think you should try it. Hatching is fun. And I think you will be right 50% of the time if you hatch enough for averages to mean anything.

 

[everyday_farmlife]

That's been around a long time. One of the ancient Greeks wrote about it, I believe it was Aristotle, though he thought the pointy eggs were pullets and the round eggs were cockerels. Exactly opposite to today's wisdom. It's so simple you wonder why the commercial hatcheries don't use it, that would be worth a lot of money to them. They must be stupid to not do something so simple to greatly improve their profits.

I totally think you should try it. Hatching is fun. And I think you will be right 50% of the time if you hatch enough for averages to mean anything.

For sure I will be trying it come September though I'll hatch a dozen of each just in case

 

[Ridgerunner]

Hopefully you will hatch them separately so there is no way you can get them mixed up.

 

[Battlepants]

So, I was going to outright reject this theory on the grounds of xx/xy chromosome determination of humans. The theory I was going to follow is that the male would effectively determine the sex of the offspring and the female will be laying regardless. BUT, it looks like chickens go by zz/zw chromosomes, where the male is the zz and female is zw. So, in this setup, the egg is technically sexed even if it is not fertilized since there will either be a z or a w on every laying, just will need that male z to actually form a chicken.

There may be some truth to variance between sexed eggs. I have my doubts that it would be as obvious as egg shape, but hopeful. Keeping an eye on this one!

 

[Ridgerunner]

To fuel your theory the hen does determine sex of the chick before the egg is ever fertilized by a rooster. Hens tend to lay the same shape of an egg each time, we can often tell which hen laid an egg by shape as well as color or size if you only have a few hens and there is a regular difference. That general shape is going to be determined by genetics.

The flaw in the theory is that whether it is a male or female chick is supposed to be passed down randomly. So while a hen may typically lay a pointy egg whether it produces a male or female should, in theory, balance out to 50-50 if you hatch enough for averages to mean anything. That's all theoretical but theories need to be tested.

There have been other threads on the forum where people were supposed to test this theory. Some people said it worked every time for them while others said not at all. Most people tend to not get back and post their results. I have little confidence that many people actually rigorously tested the theory. Did they keep track of which chick hatched from which egg? Did they use a dubious theory to determine sex? One time I started to test this myself but noticed that about 1/4 of my eggs were rounded, 1/4 pointed, and 1/2 somewhere in between. I could not get enough eggs that were clearly pointed or clearly round to put as many eggs as I wanted in the incubator so I didn't try it. I was only going to use one shape so I couldn't get the chicks mixed up.

I think this would be a fun experiment to try. See what results you get with your flock. See how repeatable it is. It might make a good science fair project if you start hatching this spring and do a few hatches to get ready for next year's science fair if they keep good records and use a rigorous methodology. Or just have fun with it.

 

[MysteryChicken]

I've tried this once, the egg shape had no correlation to gender.

 

[sourland]

No !