Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Randomly I ask how does an egg get its shell? The answer is kind of surprising.

Diagram of the egg factory that is a chicken.
So the other day, I was standing at the stove making scrambled eggs when I wondered, how does a chicken get its shell? It seemed odd to me that a chicken could lay one of these large things every single day and that it could come out in its own package. So I asked Google and found a video that explains it. But here are some facts I also discovered about hens that I find kind of cool.

1) A hen's ovary contains all of the ova it will ever have when its hatched.
2) The ovary begins to convert ova to egg yolks when she is mature.
3) You need the right lighting conditions to get hormones to stimulate ova to develop into yolks.
4) Yolks are released from the ovary into the oviduct when they reach the right size and travel down the oviduct to acquire their whites, membranes, color, and shell.

Anyway, below is a short video that explains how the actual shell takes shape. I thought I'd share it in case any of you out there also wondered how an egg got its shell. If you are one of these curious people, watch and learn. :) It's actually pretty interesting.

Have a great Tuesday.

19 comments:

  1. Consider my mind blown (and I know what I'm having for breakfast this morning)! :)

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  2. Life is pretty amazing. And delicious.

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  3. Hi Michael .. that's fascinating and I hadn't realised the process before ... thanks for sharing with us .. Interesting about the calcite columns and then melding together to form the shell itself ...

    I shall now look at eggs in a new knowledgeable light! Cheers Hilary

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  4. I'm always curious about random trivia things like this. What a great random blog post!

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  5. I'm glad I already ate breakfast. And did not eat eggs.

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  6. That is pretty awesome. I know eggs vs live birth comes up a lot in any pop science book about evolution. It really is an amazing topic, as most of biology is, really.

    You're the man, Michael.

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  7. What I hate is when the shell gets in my yolk.

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  8. I confess I've never wondered about this. I'm still busy trying to figure out why the chicken crossed the road.

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  9. Amazing all the information that is out there that we can access. All we have to do is to form the question.

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  10. Chickens are pretty interesting. And I do like deviled eggs ;)

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  11. This reminds me, I gotta do deviled eggs for friday's pot luck.

    Very interesting Mike :)

    .....dhole

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  12. I am always looking for random fun trivia for work so this was fun... although the explanation was a bit long for my schedule so it won't make it but I did enjoy it. Thanks! They had some other cool vids as well but I didn't see one explaining why eggs might have double yolks (or triple). Cheers!

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  13. Cool video and info. Funny, because my grandmother had a farm and one summer I helped to gather chicken eggs for breakfast. I didn't wonder about eggshells then, but only now do I realize that giving birth to those big (relative to a chicken) hard things has gotta hurt.

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