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Normally the egg is incubated outside the body. However, in one recorded case, the egg incubation occurred entirely within a chicken. The chick hatched inside and emerged from its mother without the shell, leading to internal wounds that killed the mother hen. [8] Embryo development remains suspended until the onset of incubation.
The incubator is recorded being used to hatch bird and reptile eggs. It lets the fetus inside the egg grow without the mother needing to be present to provide the warmth. Chicken eggs are recorded to hatch after about 21 days, but other species of birds can take a longer or shorter amount of time. [10] Incubators are also used to raise birds. [11]
A common practice among hatcheries for egg-laying hens is the culling of newly hatched male chicks since they do not lay eggs and do not grow fast enough to be profitable for meat. There are plans to more ethically destroy the eggs before the chicks are hatched, using "in-ovo" sex determination.
Figure 1. Feathering types in ten-day-old chicks.Left: Fast normal-feathering chick. Right: Delayed-feathering chick carrying sex-linked K gene. Delayed-feathering in chickens is a genetically determined delay in the first weeks of feather growing, which occurs normally among the chicks of many chicken breeds and no longer manifests itself once the chicken completes adult plumage.
The sex-linked slow-feathering gene can be used for crosses where the sex of the chicks can be determined at hatching time by the length of the wing feathers. A cross between a fast-feathering male and a slow-feathering female results in offspring where the female chicks have primary wing feathers that are significantly longer than the coverts ...
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Newly-hatched chicks of both modern and heritage varieties weigh the same, about 37 g (1.3 oz). Modern varieties however grow much faster; by day 35 a Ross 708 broiler may weigh 1.8 kg (4.0 lb) as against the 1.05 kg (2.3 lb) of a heritage chicken of the same age. [21]