In January 2024, interesting news came out. The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding stated that the giant panda He Ye, who was previously regarded as a “brother”, is actually a “sister”.
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What are the consequences of a giant panda gender identification error that turns Panda and Ye from younger brother to younger sister? It doesn't seem to have any bad effects. It just gives everyone a little more trivia knowledge and understands “Why is it so easy to mistake the gender of pandas?”
However, for the poultry breeding industry, if the gender identification error of chickens reaches a certain scale, the production company will suffer huge economic losses. For example, if you want the chicken to lay eggs, but after raising it for half a year, you find that it is a rooster.
In order to avoid this loss, a mysterious profession that requires extremely high requirements for the operator's vision and skills——Professional chicken discernerThe answer is to identify the gender of newborn chicks.
Why do newborn chicks have to be divided into male and female?
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The newly hatched chicks are fluffy, huddled together and chirping, very cute. But in the poultry production process, they immediately have to undergo a round of strict emotional selection, which is to separate males from females.
In the poultry production process, chick gender identification is a very important part, and it is not an exaggeration to regard it as the starting switch of a batch of chickens. This is because:
If you are raising broiler chickens, roosters and hens eat food and grow meat at different rates, so they need to be sold and raised separately, otherwise it will be inconvenient to manage;
If you are raising laying hens, of course you only need to raise hens if you want eggs, and the roosters will naturally be eliminated directly;
If you are raising breeder chickens, because the feeding amount and grouping standards are different, you need to keep the males and females separately from the brooding and rearing periods. Non-cage breeding chickens are allowed to mix the males and females during the laying period, but they will still be fed separately. material.
In order to meet these needs, chick identification is essential, but this job is not easy at all and has even been a problem that has plagued the poultry industry for centuries.
It was not until the 1820s that Japanese veterinary scientists discovered that the sex of a chick could be determined by its cloaca, which immediately changed the global hatchery industry and gave birth to a unique profession –Professional chicken discerner.
Professional chicken identification? I heard you don’t work overtime?
Professional chicken identifyers, also called identifyers, are responsible for identifying the gender of chickens after they hatch.
Depending on the poultry breed, identification will vary. At present, there are two main artificial visual identification schemes, one is feather speed identification and the other is inversion anal identification.
The so-called feather speed is to observe the feathers. The primary wing feathers and secondary primary wing feathers of chicks will show different growth rates (i.e. observed length) due to different genders. However, the identification of anal inversion requires opening the cloaca of the chick with bare hands to observe the characteristic points. The applicable scope of anal inversion identification is wider than that of feather speed identification.
Feather speed identification, photo source: Royal Pas Reform
Although the principle of identification can be explained in one sentence, it is really difficult to do.
Identifiers are a very professional type of work. It usually takes at least 3 to 6 months of practical training to train an anus examiner (just looking at PPT is not enough) in order to meet the efficiency requirements of commercial production (chicks can be identified 700 to 800 times per hour). Only, the accuracy rate exceeds 99%).
Bank tellers use practice coupons to count money, while trained appraisers generally use eliminated chicks from hatcheries for practice. In addition to the ability to identify key points, the anus-turning technique is equally important. If the technique is not delicate enough, it may directly cause damage to the cloaca of the chicks and cause losses.
Image source: youtu.be screenshot
In China, most manufacturers use manual identification. How important are appraisers to a hatchery?The whole day's work flow in an incubation factory must be carried out around the work efficiency of the appraiser, because this is the key factor in the production workshop.The only type of work that absolutely cannot work for 8 consecutive hours, nor can you work overtime after accumulating 8 hours..
If the appraiser uses his eyes too much, the identification efficiency will be greatly reduced, and the losses caused by the reduction in identification accuracy are often beyond the reach of the enterprise. Assume that 10,000 laying hens are raised, and the identifiers of these chickens work overtime for one hour on the day the chickens are released. Due to factors such as fatigue, the identification efficiency drops by 1%.
This ratio seems to be only a little, but it means that the farm not only has to eliminate 100 more roosters that eat free food but cannot lay eggs, but it is also equivalent to losing 100 more hens that could have laid eggs. Isn’t the gain outweighed by the loss?
What should the chicken discerner do if he makes a mistake?
A chicken discerner has to look at thousands of chickens a day, and it is inevitable that there will be times when judgments are wrong. At this time, remedial measures are needed to make sure the situation is correct.
During the farm raising process, misidentified chickens can be found in the middle of the rearing period. The earlier they are discovered, the less adverse impact they will have on the entire colony. We call misidentified chickens “false roosters” (hens mixed with roosters) or “false hens” (roosters mixed with hens).
According to the author's personal experience, if you catch the rooster and pat it, the crow will be louder. Experienced breeders can usually identify the unsociable “fake chicken” through the way the chicken walks and its body shape.
Such misidentified chickens have been fed feed that does not meet their growth needs for more than ten weeks, and the chickens that are returned to their original gender will not be able to grow normally and need to be eliminated directly.
Will evaluators be replaced by AI?
It's possible, but not anytime soon.
Although high-tech companies have now developed a machine to automatically identify the gender of chicks. The machine has an anal turning efficiency of 1,200 birds/hour and a feather speed identification efficiency of 3,000 chickens/hour. However, the accuracy rate is only 98%. At this stage, it is not as good as manual work (skilled workers). Up to 99.5% accuracy).
However, the machine is better at stable efficiency and long continuous working time. At present, some large-scale manufacturers have adopted the solution of replacing labor with machines.
Automatic gender identification machine, source: Internet
In addition, there are molecular-level identification methods such as flow cytometry, Embrex, PCR, etc. Although these methods are more accurate than manual methods, they are more costly, more difficult to operate, and require more time. long, so it cannot be used for large-scale production.
With the development of science and technology, there is a risk of being replaced by machines for jobs with technical barriers such as appraisers, so we still cannot sit back and relax.
references
[1]Halle M, Papadakis M. A new dawn of managing cardiovascular risk in obesity: the importance of combining lifestyle intervention and medication. Eur Heart J. 2024 Feb 16:ehae091.
[2]Prospective Associations of Different Combinations of Aerobic and Muscle-Strengthening Activity With All-Cause, Cardiovascular, and Cancer Mortality. JAMA Intern Med. August 7, 2023.
Planning and production
Author丨SamKakeru Popular Science Creator
Review丨Huang Chengming, researcher at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Planning丨Lin Lin
Editor-in-Chief丨Ding Ao Linlin
Reviewer丨Xu Lai