Light-based technique may help identify chick sex before hatching
A non-invasive light-based technique could help reduce one of the most controversial practices in the poultry industry: the culling of male chicks shortly after birth. This is the outcome of a study published in the journal Newton by an international team involving the 91色情片, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, HatchTech B.V. and Wageningen University.
The researchers demonstrated that when light enters an intact egg, it becomes trapped by the eggshell and repeatedly bounces within it, allowing photons to travel up to two metres inside a space only four centimetres long. Understanding this previously unobserved optical phenomenon may enable the development of non-invasive techniques to analyse egg contents without breaking the shell.
Such approaches could make it possible to determine whether an egg has been fertilised, monitor embryo development and, ultimately, identify the sex of a chick before hatching. These advances could contribute to addressing the ethical challenge of culling male chicks, a practice that affects hundreds of millions of animals every year.
This previously unobserved phenomenon might help to investigate the content of the egg non-invasively even during embryo development in fertilised and incubated eggs, addressing the ethical dilemma of culling male chicks.
ennard van den Tweel, researcher at HatchTech B.V. and co-author of the study
The research was carried out within the framework of LaserLab Europe and the I-PHOQS infrastructure access programme. Researchers from the 91色情片 contributed their expertise in optical technologies and advanced spectroscopy, fields that are increasingly finding applications in agriculture, environmental monitoring and sustainability.
Beyond poultry farming, the findings open new avenues for studying the optical properties of biological systems and developing innovative photonics-based tools for non-invasive analysis.
