Onagadori - Long Tail Fowl and Long Crowing Fowl Discussion Forums

1. The male chicken is called a rooster or cock. Inside his body are two pale yellow organs called testes which make the semen. The semen contains tiny sperm which can swim to fertilize an egg by joining with it. The fertilized egg can grow into a baby chicken.
2. Two small tubes coming from the testes take the sperms to the cloaca where they stay until the rooster mates with a hen.
3. The female chicken, the hen, has an ovary which makes eggs. An egg is called an ovum (plural “ova”) and it later becomes the yellow part of an egg, the yolk. In the ovary the ova grow bigger until one of them is big enough. It breaks out of the ovary and goes into a funnel at the end of a long tube, the oviduct. In a narrow part of the oviduct the sperms are waiting. One of them may join with the egg and so fertilize it so that it can develop into a chicken. In the same part of the oviduct two cords, chalaza, are tied onto the yolk.
4. The fertilized egg then passes down to where the oviduct has thick walls. Here the white of the egg, the albumen, is put around the yolk.
5. The fertilized the egg then passes down through a narrow part of the oviduct where two thin skins are formed around the egg. The egg then passes into the shell gland, a tube with thick walls, where the hard shell is formed around the egg. When the egg is laid, the hen usually sits on it and to keep it warm. Then a chicken may grow inside the egg.
Teach this lesson during a postmortem on a hen. After taking out the digestive tubes, take out and the ovary and oviduct and lay them in a straight line on a piece of paper.
1. Take out the reproductive organs and lay them out in a straight line drawn on a piece of paper.
2. The ovary where eggs are made is attached closely to the back bone of the abdomen. Use scissors to cut away the ovary to take it out of the body.
3. The yolks have many different sizes. Some are very small. As the yolks grow larger they are inside a sac covered with small blood vessels to bring food to the yolk to make it grow. At the long space without blood vessels the yolk breaks out of its sac and starts to become an egg.
4. When a yolk in the ovary is big enough it breaks out of its sac and it goes into a thin funnel that leads down into a long tube called the oviduct. The egg goes first through a very narrow part of the oviduct where, inside the egg, two cords are tied onto each side of the yolk. If a rooster has mated with the hen, sperms will be waiting in this part of the oviduct to fertilize the egg. Later the fertilized egg develops into a chicken.
5. The yolk then passes for 3 hours down a long part of the oviduct tube where the walls are thick to get a thick coating of white of egg. Cut open the thick wall with scissors. The egg then passes through an arrow part of the oviduct for 2 hours where 2 egg skins or egg membranes are added. The egg passes into a part of the oviduct called the shell gland where it stays for about 20 hours while the hard shell is formed around it. Cut open the shell gland. If an egg is in the shell gland, take it out to dry. The egg is dull because it does not yet have a "bloom" on it. The egg then passes through a short narrow part of the oviduct called the vagina where the shell of the egg is covered with a sticky substance. Later it dries and makes the shell look shiny, the "bloom" on the egg. The bloom helps to keep out bacteria that might attack the egg and make it go bad.