The Chicken & the Egg

> Hens lay 15 to 20% more eggs when they live on a 26-hour day (14 hours of light, alternating with twelve of darkness) in artificially illuminated henhouses, report scientists : Rutgers University and the University of Maryland. Reason: hens feel an urge to lay eggs at 26-hour intervals--at 8 a.m. one day, 10 a.m. the next, etc.--and in an ordinary 24-hour day the time to lay eventually comes when they are asleep.

> The wondrous sulfa drugs are now being used against animal diseases. Sulfanilamide cures fowl pneumonia and several eye infections, reports D. E. Lothamer of Louisville, Ohio; and sulfaguanidine cures intestinal coccidiosis, another common henyard plague, reports Professor Jerry R. Beach of the University of California. Such drugs are now a bit too costly for widespread use by poultrymen, notes Beach, but a large demand would cut the cost to a practical level.

> Because U.S. chickens consume more vitamin D than the U.S. citizenry, Du Pont has developed a synthetic product to replace the cod-liver oil formerly imported and fed to poultry. Made from sterols (solid alcohols) extracted from animal fats and irradiated with ultraviolet light, it is conveniently dry rather than gooey, like fish oils. Poultrymen last year spent thousands of dollars for vitamin D products to insure strong-shelled eggs, high hatching rates, low mortality.

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