Why do chickens lay eggs every day? Won't they get angry if their eggs are taken?

Chickens, as a kind of poultry that often appears on human tables, not only contribute themselves to humans, but also their "offspring". In a sense, chickens can be considered as "producers", of course, mainly hens, because they have the value of laying eggs.

Hens eating food in the farm

So why do chickens lay eggs every day? Don't they get angry when their eggs are taken? In the dinosaur era, chickens were the dominant species on Earth.

Hen incubating eggs

Chicken's egg-laying mechanism

As viviparous animals, humans have never been able to understand how the "eggs" of oviparous animals are formed. Even though we eat eggs almost every day, when it comes to the "egg-laying mechanism" of chickens, in fact, no one is very clear.

Schematic diagram of the internal structure of an egg

It turns out that after the hen reaches sexual maturity, it will begin to produce eggs, and these eggs will enter the cloaca through the oviduct. During this process, the eggs will undergo tremendous changes.

First, the yolk will begin to settle and eventually enter the cloaca, waiting for a while to be fertilized. If it is not fertilized, the egg will continue to move down, and then continue to improve itself, producing egg white and eggshell, and finally leaving the hen's body to become the egg we see.

Schematic diagram of the egg-laying process in the oviduct of a hen

From this point of view, eggs are actually ova released from the ovaries of hens. Whether fertilized or not, these ova can become eggs. For humans, unfertilized eggs are no different, whether in terms of nutritional value or other aspects.

So why do hens continue to ovulate even though they don't mate much?

This is because chickens have retained a mechanism from ancient times, which is to give their eggs and roosters' sperm a longer "shelf life." After all, in that "turbulent" era, it was not easy to meet, and it was even more difficult to stay together.

The hen working hard to incubate eggs

So after they complete mating, the rooster's sperm can not only survive in the hen's body for more than ten days, but the hen will also continuously ovulate in order to breed more offspring, allowing these eggs to enter the cloaca and come into contact with the sperm.

From this point of view, the breeding strategy of chickens is actually "winning by quantity". Only when there is a steady supply of the two types of reproductive cells can there be a chance of fertilized eggs. This is why chickens lay eggs every day.

A hen can lay 200 to 250 eggs a year.

Of course, some people say that a hen can actually recognize her "lover", and she knows that the sperm left in her body is her lover's. So in order to give birth to more offspring of this chicken, the hen will start to ovulate frantically. However, I always feel that chickens should not be so smart.

So, what kind of bug did humans encounter that caused chickens to enter the egg-laying cycle? Do chickens not care about humans taking away the eggs they worked so hard to lay?

A loving family of chickens

Humans use 'bug' to put egg-laying into a cycle

Since scientists had previously extracted some data from dinosaur bones and discovered that chickens showed a striking similarity to these data, many people regarded dinosaurs as the earliest ancestor of chickens, and this egg-laying bug appeared in the dinosaur era.

Conceptual image of the dinosaur era

Everyone knows that dinosaurs are also oviparous animals, and although they were the dominant species on Earth at the time, their living environment was far less "comfortable" than that of humans. Moreover, choosing oviparous breeding has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it does not interfere with the mother's foraging and life, but the disadvantage is that the eggs may encounter many unknown accidents when left in the nest.

For example, if a dinosaur accidentally stepped on its egg by a passerby, or if it was picked up and cooked by other creatures with a habit of eating eggs, it would be difficult for the dinosaur to accept.

So the same thing happened to chickens that previously lived in the wild. Since they couldn't stay in the nest to incubate eggs all the time, they could only implement the "more children, more blessings" strategy, and even mix fertilized eggs with unfertilized eggs to reduce the probability of chicks dying before they were hatched.

Conceptual drawing of dinosaur eggs

Of course, since laying eggs is still a very laborious task, hens will not always maintain a very high egg-laying frequency, and their consecutive egg-laying days will vary. It can even be said that hens will "calculate" the number of eggs in their nests, and once the number meets the needs of hatching, they will stop laying eggs and start hatching instead.

However, humans obviously don't want hens to waste time hatching eggs, especially farms that aim to harvest eggs. Therefore, they will take away a few eggs from the nest while the hens are not paying attention, ensuring that the "egg storage" does not meet the hatching standard, so that the hens will continue to lay eggs, entering the so-called "cycle".

"I really want to hatch some eggs and take a rest!"

It is worth mentioning that if you ask the hen what she thinks about the eggs being taken away, whether she will be angry, based on the current situation, if she notices it, she will still be angry, and sometimes she will even peck at people. This means that the hen will not only protect the chicks, but also the unhatched eggs.

However, as we often say, "If you don't fear thieves stealing, you fear thieves thinking about it." Humans, the "egg thieves," always pay attention to the dynamics of the hens' nests, and can always steal the eggs when they are not prepared. So, this may be the sadness of the weak. No matter how much resistance and vigilance, it will be useless.

Eggs are densely packed in the farm

It can be seen that there are actually two bugs related to egg laying in chickens. The first is that their eggs survive for a long time and they will ovulate continuously for the sake of population growth. The second is that if there are too few eggs in the nest, they will not enter the "bathing mode". Humans take advantage of this bug to make hens think that there are not enough eggs and they have to continue laying eggs.

If chickens are really closely related to dinosaurs, then these former overlords of the earth would probably be very helpless to see these chickens being "deceived" by humans. After all, they were powerful creatures of that era, so how come their descendants have become like this? So, are chickens really related to dinosaurs?

Conceptual image of the "dinosaur chicken"

Are chickens really descended from dinosaurs?

Previously, researchers at North Carolina State University in the United States extracted some proteins from a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bone, and these proteins were very similar to certain proteins in chickens.

They believe that this can prove that there is a certain relationship between dinosaurs and chickens, and even that chickens evolved from dinosaurs.

Researcher Mary Schweitzer said: "For hundreds of years, people thought that the fossilisation process destroyed all the original material, so no one had looked closely at real old bones. However, mass spectrometry revealed that the Tyrannosaurus fossils contain sequences of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, that look just like the collagen in chickens."

Conceptual image of dinosaurs evolving into chickens

It is worth mentioning that this discovery can only show that there is a certain connection between dinosaurs and chickens, but it cannot directly identify it as the ancestor of chickens. According to current research, the ancestor of domestic chickens should be the red jungle fowl, which not only looks very similar to domestic chickens, but also has similar habits.

Of course, to some extent, chickens and dinosaurs have similar habits, including some characteristics of walking. Therefore, scientists hope to find more secrets about dinosaurs from chickens. As early as 2009, the famous paleontologist Jack Horner said that he wanted to obtain ancient dinosaur DNA from chickens and use it to revive a dinosaur.

Schematic diagram of the evolution of chickens

Seeing this, many people probably think of the method of resurrecting dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park". However, it is actually very difficult to resurrect dinosaurs using chickens, and it is impossible to achieve based on the current development of biological science.

Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park

I wonder what the chickens would think if they knew that their ancestors might be the dinosaurs that once dominated the earth for hundreds of millions of years. They are probably also wondering why the world's overlord has changed over time?

Moreover, compared to the dinosaur era, human "plunder" of other animals seems to be more cruel. For example, they use card bugs to make chickens lay eggs continuously, and eventually turn them into ruthless egg-laying machines.

We have to thank the hens for their hard work

In addition, since hens can lay eggs without fertilization, roosters are useless in people's eyes. Therefore, every year, many newly born "chickens" are sent to the conveyor belt and eventually hanged because they are male. For this reason, many people think that this treatment method is too cruel.

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