Morphometric characteristics of the fertile egg and its relation to sex in birds with commercial brown posture

Abstract

The poultry sector has been one of the most dynamic subsectors of the agricultural sector in Colombia during the last decades, however, the aviculture specialized in egg production seeks to find an economical sexing system and easy application, to predict the sex of the bird before hatching Given these circumstances, the present study was carried out as an experiment under controlled conditions to determine the sex of 1000 fertile eggs of commercial brown posture birds of the Lohmann Brown line, with the use of morphometric measurements. Before the incubation, the length, width and weight of the egg were measured. The volume and shape index were calculated using the aforementioned measures. It was found that the morphometric variables width, length and egg shape index showed significant statistical differences under the test LSD Fisher, in the comparison of means of the two sexes (p <0.01), while the volume and weight did not present significant statistical differences between the sexes (p> 0.05). The analysis multiple logistic regression by forward steps showed that the shape index variable was the most informative to capture the probability of the sex of the chick to be incubated. According to the results of the present study, the morphological measurements of the egg can be an indicator of the sex of the chick, making it possible to incubate more female chickens using the predictions of these measurements. In order to reduce the number of male chickens that are killed in hatcheries and increasing the capacity of incubation of female chicks.