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Comment by oneoff786 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand how sexing birds isn’t a solved ML problem

I mean, you kind of have to squeeze them a little to see the genitalia. I guess you could have a human hold the bird over the camera or something to sex it, but it's just as easy to teach that human to tell the difference themselves.

I don't really see how machine learning would improve this process

It was also technologically easier to develop sex-link chickens, where the male chicks are one color and the female another.

If birds can identify their own genders from exterior physical characteristics then that means there are subtle physical clues that can be trained via ML.

Can birds tell a male just-hatched chick from a female? I don't know that I've heard of that in any bird. I guess I don't even know how you could test for that. I can ID a typical mature rooster from across the yard. It's the babies that are hard.

Crap, I can't tell a human baby's gender just from the face. The secondary sex characteristics show up closer to puberty pretty much by definition.

I confess my mind jumped to sexing chicken eggs that are probably in a controlled environment anyway. Not a live bird.

I'm not sure if you can sex them in the egg. Maybe there's some kind of cue.

Male chicks are destroyed in commercial poultry operations. But today you can sex the eggs in the hatchery within three days of incubation. AI is also trained to identify and segregate. In a lot of ways, yes..it’s a solved problem. Adoption will take time but we will get there. Also true for turkeys and ducks as male turkey poults and female ducklings are also destroyed in commercial hatcheries.

Which technique gives you the sex of an egg after 3 days of incubation? I'm reading on this and I'm seeing methods that get down to a week. It's testing for hormones as well and unless you consider being able to read a test AI, I'd also be interested to hear how that is being utilized.

Spectroscopy identifies nucleus in the red blood cells of the last three days of 21 day incubation period. It can be as early as three days after fertilization. All of this..identifying fertilized eggs, environment management and nutrient for post incubation/pre hatching stage..is automated in modern commercial hatcheries. The sex identifying genetic marker is in the nucleus of the red blood cells. Male chicks can be identified at 910nm band of fluorescence in their haemoglobin.

Your first sentence makes no sense, but it did give me enough keywords to find an actual explanation of the process, so that does clear it up.

I'm aware that the rest of this is automated. I guess I just haven't kept up to date with the last 5 years of chicken sexing technology.

I am glad you got the answers you needed.

I assumed your comment was a joke, but after reading the answers I'm not sure anymore

Well I read the word sexting and spit out my coffee.

Maybe it is and humans are just cheaper?

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