With Easter just around the corner, we are surrounded by a ubiquity of eggs and adorable yellow chicks that symbolize life and resurrection. In stark contrast is the fact that around seven billion male layer chicks, are shredded or gassed alive by the egg industry every year, just hours after they hatch. Male chicks of course cannot lay eggs, and they are furthermore not worth fattening up like broilers, due to decades of specialized breeding toward either egg laying or meat production – but not both.
Calculations show that it costs one dollar to kill each chick – an annual cost of approximately seven billion dollars, and thus this also constitutes a significant expense for the industry.
“While the ethical aspect of systematically killing so many animals is obvious to many of us, the ways we currently try to solve the problem are also problematic from a wider perspective,” says Rebecca Rutt, an associate professor at the Department of Food and Resource Economics who researches industrial animal production.
In the wake of pressure from animal rights organisations, a few countries have now banned chick culling, including Germany, Austria and France. In Denmark, where the practice remains legal, more than three million day-old male layer chicks are culled every year – including those from free-range and organic production systems. But according to Rebecca Rutt, the imposition of bans is not a real solution:
“In countries where killing has been made illegal, male chicks are often exported. They end up in places where they are kept alive as cheaply as possible and often under poor conditions, just long enough for them to be legally slaughtered, at which point they are often used to make products like pet food. So from an animal welfare perspective, the bans are no solution,” says Rutt, who, together with research colleague Jostein Jakobsen from the University of Oslo, studied the ongoing and emerging alternatives to chick culling coming from the biotech sector.
Patch-up solutions?
Many animal welfare organizations point out that a better solution would be to avoid having male layer chicks born in the first place. In response, biotech companies in several countries are vying to develop technologies for this purpose, and in some cases even being publicly subsidized to do so. The technologies include several methods to determine an embryo’s sex so males can be destroyed prior to incubation and hatching – ideally as early as possible. One at least is even attempting to alter the sex of chicks through environmental stimuli, utilizing birds’ natural genetic plasticity.
“The technological solutions are presented as a multi-win, because the industry actors may save money on incubation and human labor costs, there’s less energy expended, and, of course, the lives of the newborn chicks are spared. Taken on its own, this seems like a good solution. But at the same time, such ‘solutions’ also serve to uphold an industry that is riddled with ethical problems for those chickens that live” says Rebecca Rutt.
These include the widespread keel bone fractures in egg laying hens, pecking and cannibalism among stressed chickens that lack space and sunlight and/or that are kept in flock sizes too large to allow them to establish a natural hierarchy, not to mention the ‘turbo’ chickens which fatten so quickly that their organs and legs cannot bear their own body weight.
In a Finnish outcrop nestled between some of Northern Europe’s oldest mountains, researchers have found traces of a previously hidden part of Earth’s crust that points more than three billion years back in time and north towards Greenland.
These traces were found in the mineral zircon, which after chemical analyses, indicated to researchers from the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management that the “foundation” upon which Denmark and Scandinavia rest, was probably ‘born’ from Greenland approximately 3.75 billion years ago.
“Our data suggest that the oldest part of Earth’s crust beneath Scandinavia originates in Greenland and is about 250 million years older than we previously thought,” says Professor Tod Waight, a geologist at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management.
The researchers’ study of the zircon showed that, in several ways, its chemical fingerprint matches those of some of the oldest rocks on the planet found in West Greenland’s North Atlantic Craton.
“The zircon crystals we found in river sand and rocks from Finland have signatures that point towards them being much older than anything ever found in Scandinavia, while matching the age of Greenlandic rock samples. At the same time, the results of three independent isotope analyses confirm that Scandinavia’s bedrock was most likely linked to Greenland,” says Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management researcher Andreas Petersson.
Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland rest atop a part of Earth’s crust known as the Fennoscandian Shield, or the Baltic Shield. The researchers believe that it broke away from Greenland as a “seed” and shifted for hundreds of millions of years until it “took root” where Finland is today.
Here, the plate grew as new geological material accumulated around it, until it became Scandinavia. At the time of the crust’s detachment from Greenland, the planet looked very different than today.
“Earth was probably a watery planet, like in the movie Waterworld, but without any oxygen in the atmosphere and without emergent crust. But, because that’s so far back in time, we can’t be really be sure about what it actually looked like,” says Tod Waight.
According to the researchers, the fact that Earth even has a continental crust composed of granite is quite special when they look out into space and compare it with other planets in our galactic neighborhood.
“This is unique in our solar system. And, evidence of liquid water and a granite crust are key factors when trying to identify habitable exoplanets and the possibility of life beyond Earth,” explains Andreas Petersson.
The researchers analysed zircons from modern river sand and rock samples from the remote Pudasjärvi and Suomujärvi regions of Finland, whose geological origins have been little studied.
The zircon crystals found in the Finnish river sand originally crystallized in granitic magmas deep within the crust. These granites were then lifted to the surface and eroded to eventually form sand.
The researchers used isotopic compositions of lead, hafnium and oxygen to trace the chemical fingerprint from the Fennoscandian Shield back to Greenland.
The study has been published in the scientific journal Geology.
The new study adds pieces to a primordial continental puzzle that began long before life on Earth truly blossomed, but which has largely paved the way for both human and animal life.
“Understanding how continents formed helps us understand why ours is the only planet in the solar system with life on it. Because without fixed continents and water in between them, we wouldn’t be here. Indeed, continents influence both ocean currents and climate, which are crucial for life on Earth,” says Andreas Petersson.
Furthermore, the new study contributes to a growing number of studies which reject the means used thus far to calculate how continents have grown – especially during the first billion years of Earth’s history.
“The most commonly used models assume that Earth’s continental crust began to form when the planet was formed, about 4.6 billion years ago. Instead, our and several other recent studies suggest that the chemical signatures showing growth of the continental crust can only be identified about a billion years later. This means that we may need to revise much of what we thought about how early continents evolved,” says Professor Waight.
At the same time, results of the study add to previous research that found similar “seeds” from ancient crusts in other parts of the world.
“Our study provides us with another important clue in the mystery of how continents formed and spread across Earth – especially in the case of the Fennoscandian Shield. But there is still plenty that we don’t know. In Australia, South Africa and India, for example, similar seeds have been found, but we’re unsure of whether they all come from the same “birthplace”, or whether they originated independently of one another in several places on Earth. This is something that we would like to investigate more using the method we used in this study,” concludes Professor Waight.