A viral video showing Japanese high-school students hatch a chick outside of its egg is turning a lot of heads online. The video, recently fact-checked by Snopes, does indeed depict a real chick incubation technique that allows observers to watch every stage of the animal’s development—though the claim that this is the “first time” such a procedure has ever been undertaken is categorically false.
Check it out below:
According to the Journal of Poultry Science:
The development of shell-less culture methods for bird embryos with high hatchability would be useful for the efficient generation of transgenic chickens, embryo manipulations, tissue engineering, and basic studies in regenerative medicine. To date, studies of culture methods for bird embryos include the whole embryo culture using narrow windowed eggshells, surrogate eggshells, and an artificial vessel using a gas-permeable membrane. However, there are no reports achieving high hatchability of >50% using completely artificial vessels. To establish a simple method for culturing chick embryos with high hatchability, we examined various culture conditions, including methods for calcium supplementation and oxygen aeration. In the embryo cultures where the embryos were transferred to the culture vessel after 55-56 h incubation, more than 90% of embryos survived until day 17 when a polymethylpentene film was used as a culture vessel with calcium lactate and distilled water supplementations. The aeration of pure oxygen to the surviving embryos from day 17 yielded a hatchability of 57.1% (8 out of 14). Thus, we successfully achieved a high hatchability with this method in chicken embryo culture using an artificial vessel.
Even if it’s not the first time in history a shell-less hatching has occurred, the process is amazing to behold, and guarantees this viral video will be making the rounds for a long time to come.
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Author: Timothy Bertrand
Writer and journalist living in the Houston, Texas area. Follow me for breaking news, editorials, pictures of cats doing human activities, and other such content from around the web.