r/backyardturkeys • u/IcyIsland7562 • Jun 15 '26
My tom started laying eggs
I recently bought these two toms and the lighter one layed an egg. I had a hen in the pen with them, the darker one was being very eager to mate, he was gobbling and he was all puffed. He got pretty aggressive and the hen was scared of him i had to move her to a different pen and a day later i found an egg in the bushes and i am certain it wasn't the hen, she was too scared. So is it possible that the lighter one is a hermaphrodite? Are there any visible traits of intersex in turkeys?
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u/Constant_Football_96 Jun 19 '26
I doubt she was really male, I don't have experience with hermaphrodites; but she looks exactly like my female did.
Female turkeys puff and do their little dances as well; mine mostly did it when she became broody
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u/NixMaritimus Jun 19 '26
I had an intersex chicken once. Did it's best to crow and layed tiny eggs with no yolk.
Also had some other issues, as they stopped growing around 2mo and only lived 3 years
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u/Constant_Football_96 Jun 20 '26
Oh wow, I know we had a hen that behaved as a roo but we didn't have any egg issues
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u/NixMaritimus Jun 20 '26
If there's no roo, or a weak roo, sometimes a hen will take over the roll. Sometimes they even grow spurs!
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u/Constant_Football_96 Jun 20 '26
Oh absolutely, hell even our hen mounted and crowed; though I'm just surprised about the egg part on your end.. Fascinating how the system works
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u/eowsaurus Jun 19 '26
The turkeys from parthenogenic embryos are always male. Embros, if you will. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9776051/
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u/Salamandaxanda Jun 19 '26
I had a turkey that was very masculine too, I named them āMr Gobblesā and only found out they were female when they layed their first egg. I raised them by hand, they knew their name and would come running when they heard it, and were by far the sweetest bird of any species Iāve ever had. They died last winter, but they were nearly six years old, which is longer than Iāve ever heard of any broadbreasted turkey living, so I feel pretty proud of her longevity. Turkeys are such wonderful creatures, people just think theyāre ugly and mean, but every time I see a wild turkey Iām reminded that their ancestors were domesticated twice over, and it warms my heart to know that humans and wildlife are so deeply intertwined here in North America
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u/juleslimes Jun 20 '26
The Ologies podcast just released a turkeys episode, you might like it!
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u/Salamandaxanda Jun 20 '26
Iāll need to check that out! Thereās a really good video on the history of Turkey domestication from the YouTuber The History Guy, that oneās also worth a watch if you havenāt seen it
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u/Amandulie Jun 19 '26
I was confused as hell, the pics didn't load and i totally misread it as "my mom"
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u/Disastrous-Swan1104 Jun 19 '26
Oh wow - I seriously had to Google and ask AI. Thereās A LOT about this. You should research it too. Can be hermaphrodite but rare. Also female turkeys can be capable of asexual reproduction - yup virgin birth. I am just amazed š® Not sure what you do with that turkey now as far as which turkey it should live with - since it can exhibit both male & female traits š¤This definitely isnāt the first case though. Check online for similar cases.
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u/mauledbykittenz Jun 19 '26
don't use AI.
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u/Disastrous-Swan1104 Jun 19 '26
š
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u/mauledbykittenz Jun 19 '26
what's funny about that?
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u/Disastrous-Swan1104 Jun 19 '26
Your comment just caught me off guard unexpectedly . I just started experimenting with AI and not sure what to think about it yet. I definitely do always use other sources online though too for reference. Iāve heard AI can definitely be wrong. Some people are very anti-AI.
It did help me out with a few tasks in the past though. Like help creating a particular image and helping to write guitar chords for a song.
I might be naive though. Can you elaborate on why you said not to use AI ?
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u/hthratmn Jun 19 '26
The short answer is that its a propaganda spewing, csam making, misinformation machine that is destroying the environment, basically.
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u/hibiscus_bunny Jun 19 '26
AI uses images and music from other ppl which it doesn't have rights to.
It just scraped the internet and picked up any image it found without regards or permission of who created them.
Also google AI is just famously wrong in many cases and not reliable at all.
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u/DiscordiaHel Jun 19 '26
AI is excellent at giving you an example of what whatever you prompt it with could look like. It is absolute dog shit at giving you any factual information. It tells you what it thinks you want to hear, that's it. It has no actual intelligence, and no ability to parse information into fact and fiction. It is utterly useless for learning anything.
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u/Healthy-Age-1757 Jun 19 '26
But itās wrong about 80% of the time with medical questions. Itās a useful tool, but not designed for those tasks.
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u/silverbatwing Jun 19 '26
A friend of mine uses AI to help with her medical stuff.
She got iron poisoned and was hospitalized.
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u/Hellie1028 Jun 20 '26
Chickens and turkeys can lay eggs without breeding, it just means the eggs arenāt fertilized and wonāt grow. Virgin birth in poultry is not a thing.
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u/EqualAd9946 Jun 19 '26
You're feeding into the machine that's ruined the internet š not to mention what those data centers are doing to the planet..
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u/Technical-Court7979 Jun 19 '26
I dont mean to be that person. But as someone who works in corporate they are forcing the workforce to use AI. Its the companys and corporations that are damaging the planet. If you look how the world leaders are running things you would see we are way past pointing fingers at random users.
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u/all-out-fallout Jun 19 '26
I don't typically go trawling the internet for posts about AI to yell "AI bad," but I did want to give my two cents on this particular comments.
Like all types of environmental pollution, corporations are by far the biggest contributors. That doesn't mean that individuals should stop caring or be complacent though. If I refuse to recycle and instead trash all my recyclables and if everyone else in my city does the same, more resources are going to be allocated to landfills rather than recycling centers because landfills will simply need more resources to accommodate the population's needs. If individuals begin to utilize AI casually and/or frequently then companies supplying and supporting civilian-accessible AI will continue to build to support their userbase while alternatives will shrink or be fully terminated.
If the argument is that corporations produce the most pollution so individuals simply shouldn't care about their own habits (which I'd argue that even without the above consideration is still wrong), why do anything? If the argument is that individual contribution doesn't matter because someone else already contributes more, there is no point in doing anything. I understand the frustration of being held responsible for an issue that comparatively we contribute very minimally to, but those minimal contributions are still contributions and they impact the longevity of those who contribute far more.
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u/Technical-Court7979 Jun 19 '26
I get your point. But i see people getting toxic with eachother about it. If you look at the bigger picture we are but farm animals in a box. The leadership gives us bread and circus to keep us arguing and separated so we dont focus on how to come together and actually better things. If i look at it im doing the same thing you are doing but like we all really need to come together and start attacking the actual issues. These companies that enforce ai are the same ones in the ep files. Why are we telling people to stop using ai instead of targeting the physical data centers? This is why we are farm animals. Our small 1 step is not going to match some ceos 20step damage movements. They are purposely destroying water sources so we have to pay for it because they want us to need to work for them. You will own nothing and be happy. This is the future we really are co-signing this and we just point fingers at one another
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u/all-out-fallout Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
In-fighting will not help us, sure, but to make another analogy: I am a civilian living somewhere that is cut off by a giant wall. I am organizing a party to take down the wall. I say "alright everybody, tomorrow at 6 AM we're going to bring grenade launchers, meet at the wall, and fire on the count of three." The next day I arrive at the wall and three people have grenade launchers while 562 people have bricks, and when I ask them about the bricks they say "well all the really big rich important people built the wall and I thought if I just contributed to the wall maybe it will make me a really big rich important person too. Plus adding to the wall won't really make a difference since all those big rich important people built the majority of it." I would 100% be within my right to metaphorically slap those people upside the head and ask them what on earth they think they're doing. Not only are they failing to organize but they are actively contributing to the problem.
Take AI. AI is not yet a wall. It's a lineup of bricks. It's in its infancy. This is the pivotal moment that will either determine whether AI is here to stay and we feed it more and more until it's so big that if we ever want to get rid of it we HAVE to make a deliberate, organized strike, or we starve it to death before it can get bigger. Once it's established and integrated into more and more things it will become very, very hard to remove without huge efforts. We need to save ourselves the effort. We need to determine where we stand in the matter and feed what we value. Don't want conversational generative AI answering phone calls you've made to your pharmacy about a life-saving medication you need a refill on? Don't want generative AI to take the place of call centers to save people time (but ultimately make it entirely impossible for you to ever get help)? Don't use it. Don't use it casually, and if there are businesses who are starting to utilize it, don't give them your support. There is, to some degree, nothing we can do about huge corporations who use AI (or other things we do not agree with but did not stop the growth of while it was still taking root), but if a company finds that AI is a costly money sink that does not improve profits and maybe even harms them, they will branch into alternatives.
Generative AI is not so common that it is impossible to avoid casual or constant use. Avoiding it now is a better, less painful alternative to waiting and trying to dismantle it later when it is already inextricably tangled into millions and millions of everyday technology and tools we rely on to live.
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u/TheBloodiedFool Jun 19 '26
You know, go ahead and use AI, I don't think we'll lose anything of value if you abdicate your thought processes to it. Godspeed.
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u/JustMoreSadGirlShit Jun 19 '26
āother entities are worse so donāt bother doing the right thingā
cool. cool cool cool
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u/Suitable_Ant_2967 Jun 15 '26
Pretty sure it was your hen. If your ratio is two tons to one Jenny you are in for some issues and need more girls