Quail Fact Friday!đź’ˇ
Did you know that all quail species typically only lay around one egg per day? So how do quail hatch at the same time? The answer is a fascinating one: after being laid, the embryo inside an egg pauses development until it reaches “physiological zero.” In humans, the term physiological zero refers to the temperature that your skin will perceive as neither warm nor cold and is around 80 degrees. For birds like quail, eggs that are cooler than their physiological zero will remain in a kind of suspended animation until they reach the proper temperature by being incubated by their mother.
This is crucial for quail because they lay large clutches of eggs. It allows them to lay around one egg a day for up to several weeks, then start incubating them all at once. After the required incubation period, the entire clutch hatches within a few hours of each other, even though the earlier eggs are many days older than the last eggs that were laid. Incredible!
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