image via – youtube.com
Chickens lay eggs. Sometimes those eggs are hidden inside of other eggs. It happens. What? That all seems kind of weird and confusing, but an egg inside of an egg is a real thing that occurs in nature. If you want to see what it all looks like, and this is the type of thing that you really have to see to truly appreciate, then you have to check out this video.
The clip starts off with a man holding a giant egg that is at least twice the size of a normal, average egg. He explains that he gathered it earlier from his coop and comments that he has “sympathy for the poor chicken” who laid it because it must not have been easy or comfortable at all.
When he cracks it open there is a yolk and another egg nestled inside of it! When he cracks the second egg open it also appears normal and has a yolk and white inside. Chances are you’ll never come across an egg like that at the grocery store.
It’s super neat to see and in order to understand how it happens, you need a little background information on how hens lay eggs. First and foremost, the scientific term for an egg within an egg is called a counter-peristalsis contraction.
According to Back Yard Poultry Mag online, a hen will release “an oocyte (the ovum that becomes the yolk of an egg) from her left ovary into the oviduct every 18-26 hours.” This oocyte slowly makes its way through the oviduct organ where many layers are added onto it and form the egg which is eventually passed through and laid.
However, when a counter-peristalsis contraction occurs, a second oocyte is prematurely released by the ovary before the first one is done passing through the oviduct. At that point, “the release of a second oocyte into the oviduct system while a first oocyte is in the eggshell-gland portion of the oviduct…(where the shell is deposited over the egg) causes a contraction…[which] causes the first egg in the eggshell gland to reverse its course and be pushed back up to the top of the oviduct.”
In turn, this leads to the first egg being added to the second oocyte, which then passes through the oviduct and gets its own shell coating. The end result is that an egg within a giant egg gets laid by one tough chicken.
Mother nature never ceases to amaze or confuse us!
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