The Nose knows the sex of a fertizlized egg.
Our friend AVERY GILBERT, smell scientist and author of What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life, recently shared something amazing about a recent UC Davis study:
Dr. Gilbert:
“Can you sex a fertilized chicken egg by smelling it? Apparently so, according to a new study. Why would you want to? Because we only eat pullets, not cockerels, so sexing chicks after they’ve hatched means a LOT of male chicks are culled. Our ever-more-squeamish moral superiors worry about this and think it would be more humane to cull them in ovo. Whatevs.
Back to egg sniffing. Breeders candle eggs to monitor development and optimize hatching rates, and trained “chick sexers” separate males from females by visual inspection of the cloaca. But no one has ever sniffed fertilized eggs to sex the embryo.
In recent years, it’s emerged that male and female eggs produce distinctive patterns of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). While an egg shell is porous, with vapors passing in and out of it, we are talking such tiny amounts of VOCs that they would be imperceptible to the human nose.
What’s needed is a non-invasive means of analyzing sex-dependent egg VOCs. And that’s what a research team at UC Davis has come up with. They modified an industry-standard egg handling method, namely silicone suction cups. They attached VOC-absorbing magnetic stir bars (Gerstel Twisters) to the inside of the suction cup, placed it on the egg, and pulled air from the egg for 2 minutes using a vacuum pump. The Twisters, now saturated with inside-the-egg volatiles, were then desorbed into a GC-MS for analysis. Based on the VOC profiles, the team could sex an egg with 80% success.”
