Find A Blue Chicken Egg? Congrats, Your Chicken Has A Virus
Colored Chicken Eggs Wikimedia Commons Not necessarily harmful! But just so you know. Here in the U.S., our eggs mostly come in two colors: white and brown. But there are two breeds, one in Chile and one in China, that are known to lay blue eggs. Yeah, weird, right? And a new study has figured out why that happens. The Araucana chicken from Chile and the Dongxiang and Lushi chickens from China (none of which are particularly common in North America) are known to lay pale-blue eggs. This is rare for a chicken; while bird eggs can come in all sorts of colors and patterns, chicken eggs are almost always white or brown. So what's the deal? A new study found that a single gene, called callee oocyan, is responsible for the odd coloration of these blue chicken eggs. But how did it get there? Turns out that these chickens have a high...