Preincubation and preheating – two different methods but with one purpose for use in hatchery. Can their interaction be twice as effective?

SUMMARY

The increasing demand for simultaneous hatching of a large number of chicks has led to the need for refrigerated egg storage often over 7 days. This results in low embryo viability, low hatchability, and poor quality of chicks. To overcome these negative effects, chick producers follow a preincubation step, i.e. temporary warming of eggs to temperatures above physiological zero. Depending on the length of the planned storage, the age of the reproductive flock and the poultry species, three different preincubation profiles can be used: single (PI), multiple with an equal number of hours for each PI (SPIDES), and increasing duration of elevated temperature with each successive PI (EG SPIDES). However, this technology does not overcome the negative effects of heating eggs too quickly or too slowly to the required incubation temperature. Currently, this issue increasingly affects commercial hatcheries, which face the challenge of simultaneously raising the temperature of a very large number of eggs. In this case, preheating by a gradual temperature increase can help. Similar to preincubation, the preheating profile should be adjusted to the duration of egg storage and age and genotype of the reproductive flocks. As both methods have the same goal but different mechanisms of action and are used at different stages of egg storage, the analysis of their interaction will be crucial to further improve hatching efficiency in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Hatching eggs
• egg storage
• preincubation
• preheating

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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K. Damaziak

Dr hab. Krzysztof Damaziak is a research scientist with Departmet of Animal Breeding, Institute of Animal Science, and befor 2019 with Poultry Breeding Division, Warsaw University of Life Sciences in Poland. His areas of research were: poultry reproduction, incubation, poultry meat and eggs quality, and currently he working on the study of te variability of the structure and chemical composition vitelline membrane and eggshell. He has authored more 80 articeles of which 60 are papers published in national and international scientific journals. Since 2011 he has been an active research of the Polish branche of World's Poultry Science Association.