Eureka !

That's Greek for "I have found it!", but you probably already knew that, unless you have forgotten it, which can happen when you're our age. Yesterday I looked up "egg" and, while it told me lots of information about eggs, it didn't tell me the name of that white stringy whatchamacallit, which is what I wanted to know. I seemed to remember that all eggs, including whole bird eggs, are composed of a single cell, so tonight I looked up "egg cell", and here's what I found: It's called the "nucleolus" or "germinal spot", and it's part of the yolk, which is essentially the nucleus of an egg cell, and it's made of "ooplasm", which is a type of cytoplasm, which is what cells are made of.

Ooplasm[edit]
Ooplasm (also: oöplasm) is the yolk of the ovum, a cell substance at its center, which contains its nucleus, named the germinal vesicle, and the nucleolus, called the germinal spot.^[3]
The ooplasm consists of the cytoplasm of the ordinary animal cell with its spongioplasm and hyaloplasm, often called the formative yolk; and the nutritive yolk or deutoplasm, made of rounded granules of fatty and albuminoid substances imbedded in the cytoplasm.^[3]
Mammalian ova contain only a tiny amount of the nutritive yolk, for nourishing the embryo in the early stages of its development only. In contrast, bird eggs contain enough to supply the chick with nutriment throughout the whole period of incubation.^[3]

Who needs college when we've got Wikipedia? Kids nowadays don't appreciate what they have, they think all the internet is for is to chat with their friends about mox nix social crap when they could be learning all kinds of interesting things like this. Come to think of it, that's what most of them thought school was for, and probably still do.

We still don't know for sure why chickens lay eggs whether they're fertilized or not, but we should be able to figure that out on our own. We know that egg production drops off during times of stress, and wild birds generally experience more stress than domestic fowl. People complain about how chickens are kept nowadays in tight little cages where all they do is eat, drink, poop, and lay eggs, but chickens lay more eggs under those conditions than they would living in the wild. It would appear, then, that those caged hens must be relatively stress free. Of course none of us would be happy living like that, but we're not chickens. Chickens probably don't experience happiness and sadness like we do. All it takes to make a chicken happy is food, water, shelter, and a comfortable ambient temperature. The first thing they do when deprived of any of those things is shut down the egg factory. Chickens certainly like to scratch in the dirt and catch bugs, and those that do are probably happier than the ones living out their lives in cages, but the caged birds are unaware of the free range option, and they can't miss what they don't know exists, so they are happy enough to do their jobs without complaint, which is more than be said for a lot of people I have known.