Enhancing green sea urchin egg production

Enhancing green sea urchin egg production to aid Maine's depressed urchin market is the research focus of a University of Maine marine bioresources graduate student.

Ung Wei Kenn, a second-year master's student from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, hopes to increase the egg or roe yield of farm-raised green sea urchins through high-quality feed, a process known as bulking. His research is part of a two-year, more than $215,000 research project funded by the National Sea Grant National Strategic Initiative and led by director Nick Brown and biologist Steve Eddy of UMaine's Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research (CCAR) in Franklin, Maine.

"I was always interested in the vertical integration of aquaculture and seafood processing," says Ung, who completed his undergraduate work at the University of Tasmania, Australia. "I am also passionate about seafood that is popular in Asia. This topic is a blend of all that."

Read more at: 

For the Rooster, Size Matters: How Size of Hen's Comb Is Linked to Ability to Lay More Eggs

ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2012) — A lone rooster sees a lot of all the hens in the flock, but the hen with the largest comb gets a bigger dose of sperm -- and thus more chicks. This sounds natural, but behind all this is humanity's hunger for eggs.

For thousands of years, people have tinkered with the development of domestic chickens. Through selective breeding for a few characteristics such as large muscle mass and increased egg-laying, we have at the same time caused numerous other radical changes in appearance and behaviour. A research group at Linköping University in Sweden has now shown how the size of a hen's comb is bound up with the ability to lay more eggs. The results have been presented in the scientific journal PLoS Genetics.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120904100041.htm