Artificial insemination (AI), is a procedure often used in livestock production to facilitate and maximize breeding rates. The first official AI was performed on a bitch in 1784. by an Italian physiologist by the name of Lazzaro Spallanzaniand resulted in the birth of 3 puppies (Ombelet & Van Robays 2015). According to Donoghue & Wishart (2000), in commercial avian species, AI has been a significant reproduction since the 1960’s, namely in commercial turkeys due to increasing size of males, however development on AI began in the 1930’s. In chickens, semen is collected from the rooster and can be mixed with an extender, to be used immediately or stored for future use. Poultry semen, unlike semen of domestic mammalian, is prone to freeze damage, therefore, rather than being cryogenized, rooster semen is refrigerated for up to 24 hours (Donoghue & Wishart 2000).
To achieve fertilization, ovulation and insemination must occur simultaneously, however, the odds of both events synchronizing is slim, which is why the hen …show more content…
1999). Despite the competition between possible sire, namely due to spermiophages from each male attacking foreign sperm, pooling semen will not have any adverse effects on the overall fertility of a commercial sample (Barnes et al. 1996) This can explain why both samples of fresh semen, namely treatments 1 and 2, showed little difference between each other.
The treatment with significantly lower results than the others was stored individual semen. However, in a study comparing frozen individual and pooled roster semen, viability was slightly greater in single sourced samples (Herrara et al. 2005). Although this experiment didn’t use frozen storage, it could be expected that the results would have been similar in refrigerated