Growing Chicks

Today is day 20 of the first feeding trial I am conducting for my master's research project, so we are almost at the halfway point. We are using "life stage" diets, which means we change the diets to meet the changing metabolic needs of the chicks. They were on starter diets; today we switched them all over to grower diets.

They were without food for about two hours while we emptied the feeders, weighed what was left of the first diet, then weighed out the new diet and filled the feeders and put them back in the pens. Two hours without food to a genetically selected eating machine is an eternity!

Here's a photo of one of the pens letting us know they are quite happy with their new diet.

They are going through a bit of an awkward phase at the moment. No longer cute and yellow and fuzzy, they are growing so fast that their feathers are not quite keeping up. Everything should fill in during the next week but they all have bald patches. And you can see that most of them are starting to get a bit, well, round. It's not fat--they are growing breast muscle at an amazing rate. The actual science part is happening inside the chicks as they process their diets (we are feeding two experimental diets and a control)--we won't really know the results until we analyze the samples we will collect at the end.