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.

 

[Silexian]

My grandma swore by this theory. I have done some experimenting on it. My findings showed that egg shape had no effect on gender. Round eggs have a higher hatch rate, than pointy eggs. Chicks hatching from round eggs are less likely to pip away from the air cell. Chicks hatched from round eggs are larger and seem to be more vigorous than chicks from pointy eggs. Learning and experiencing things on your own adds a little excitement. Your findings may differ from mine. I would be curious to see other’s results.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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

 

[everyday_farmlife]

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.

Hey, so after 2 hatching seasons I have discovered the hen determines the gender regardless of egg shape.
I have a light sussex hen #02 who produced 21 pullets from 24 of her eggs last season.
This season 2 of those pullets were retained #08 and #09 and they are also throwing a lot of pullets we have hatched 24 to date (from these 2 hens) and only 2 have been cockerals, however we have another hen who was hatched from different lines last year and she has produced 6 out of 8 cockerals so she is no longer in the breeding pen!
She is however still in the show flock as she won multiple overall reserve champion soft feather last year

 

[MysteryChicken]

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

 

[sourland]

No !

 

[sourland]

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.

Fact !