
The Lucrative Art of Chicken Sexing (2017) - I-M-S
https://psmag.com/magazine/the-lucrative-art-of-chicken-sexing
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Falling3
I've worked with chickens for years. Among lay people, being able to correctly
sex a chicken after 2-3 weeks is a difficult skill.

It's incredibly interesting that these people are able to do it so easily at
such an early age. It's also put to very disturbing uses. The females go on to
be used as layer hens and the males are kill within hours of hatching -
generally in gruesome/painful ways.

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kgc
Why not grow the males to be for eating?

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fenwick67
Roosters don't lay eggs, and somebody did the math and figured out the return
on hens vs roosters is so much better it's not even worth raising the
roosters.

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Falling3
Roosters are raised for meat - just a different breed from those raised to lay
eggs.

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golem14
Not what I heard. I am led to believe the males are essentially shredded
alive.

[http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2016/06/13/us-egg-
producer...](http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2016/06/13/us-egg-producers-to-
eliminate-routine-killing-male-chicks-by-2020.html)

~~~
Buge
That's what Falling3 said. One species of rooster is shredded alive
immediately after hatching. The other species of rooster is raised so it can
be cooked and eaten.

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daveguy
If it is such a gestalt, not explainable function. I am almost certain it
isn't _just_ visual. It would be interesting to see the level of accuracy with
just video of the vent exposure. Even more so, just an image.

The article states the sexers accidentally kill some chicks at first when
learning because of the force required to expose the vents. The force required
could provide some clue. The way the vent moves under some manipulations could
make a difference.

I would rather the whole thing be solved with ultrasonic or some other imaging
well before hatching.

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rkagerer
Indeed. If they were able to maintain accuracy using images, that sounds like
it would be a perfect candidate for experimenting with machine learning (using
the tagged images).

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michaelbuckbee
The quality is bad, but Mike Rowe and his Dirty Jobs show highlighted Chicken
Sexers if you want to see more of what it entails.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gTddabBi5A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gTddabBi5A)

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burnte
I was about to post the same link because of this passage in the article:

"When I asked Pam Freeman, editor of a poultry magazine, to introduce me to a
chicken sexer, she said, "I honestly don't know anyone who has met a chicken
sexer."

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devit
Any progress on genetically engineering chicken so that only female chicks are
produced, or even better artificially producing eggs without any chickens at
all?

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saalweachter
This may actually be more difficult for chickens.

Chickens use the ZW sex chromosomes, and _females_ are ZW while males are ZZ.

This means, among other things, that it is the _female_ germ cell which
determines the sex of the offspring, by contributing either a Z or a W.

My understanding is that with mammals, you can centrifuge sperm to (more-or-
less) separate "X" and "Y" sperm, changing the odds of conception in the
direction you choose; even if you found it economical to go this route with
chickens, you wouldn't have the option, because all the chicken sperm is "Z".

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bayesian_horse
You could inject the hen with a CRISPR vector introducing a mutation into the
Z chromosome which would be letal to eggs. Then put a saving gene on the W
chromosome. Or a letal mutation on the W chromosome, to select for male
broilers.

And no, it's not centrifugation. The DNA in the chromosomes is stained, then a
cell sorter with a laser determines which ones have more or less chromatin
(the Y is missing an arm vs X).

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shaki-dora
I once attended a lecture where a law professor used chicken sexing as a
metaphor for jurisprudence. It’s surprisingly apt.

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zhte415
What was the argument of the metaphor?

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jacobkg
Chicken Sexing = Identifying a Chicken as Male or Female

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Simon_says
Thanks for the clarification.

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golergka
This whole thing just sounds like a dream for ML. Have anyone tried it yet?

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kiddico
You send some images to an API endpoint, and we send you back a determination
of m/f.

Sexing as a Service, SaaS?

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knicholes
Isn't there already an app for this on Silicon Valley and subsequently real
life? "Not Hotdog"

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swebs
Funny, because the How It's Made documentary shows them easily being separated
by checking two rows of feathers.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVf6KXVIZ5I&t=197s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVf6KXVIZ5I&t=197s)

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jedimastert
The casual-ness of those workers just chucking baby chicks into shoots weirds
me out quite a bit. Like, I'm sure they're fine, but it's just so weird.

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KozmoNau7
When you handle thousands of then every single day, you probably tend to
disassociate from the individual chicks.

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petermcneeley
Is sperm sex selection not possible? (it is in humans) Is this detectable via
ultrasound of egg? Why not breed chickens with visible sex difference?

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djrogers
Sperm selection ain’t possible with chickens, because all sperm is the same
chromosome. The females provide the variant chromosome to determine sex,
unlike mammals.

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julienfr112
What about deep learning ? Did anyone try this ? Camera + Tensorflow + big
dataset of photos ?

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Reason077
As the saying goes, if you want to make an omelette, you have to sex a lot of
chickens.

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drumttocs8
See the book on memory: Moonwalking with Einstein

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NedIsakoff
"Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School" \-- awesome band name, if I were to name it
after myself it would be the "Wang Chick Sexting School"

