In which I set up a collaboration between a biologist, a farmer and a chimeric chicken

I get a lot of emails. Most can be casually filed away, but among the spam and fluff from PR agencies, there are occasionally some absolute gems. And so it was that on August 21^st, one Paul Sanders saw fit to send me four photos of a chicken. Several months back, I wrote a piece about chickens that caught Paul’s eye. In a new paper, Mike Clinton’s group at the University of Edinburgh had found that these everyday birds have an amazing secret - every single cell in their bodies is either male or female. Each one has its own sexual identity, which is very different from the way that sex is determined in mammals. You’ll have to read the original post for a full explanation of how this works, but the important bit is that Clinton’s discovery came about through studying three very unusual chickens called gynandromorphs. Each bird looks like it has been sown together from two different chickens down the midline; one half is clearly a cockerel and the other is clearly a hen. And that’s exactly what Paul Sanders found in his coop. Sanders grew up on a farm in rural Missouri. Aside from a stint in a law firm, a spell at university, and a tour in Vietnam, he has always kept chickens (no colonel jokes, please). He contacted me after reading my piece on chimeric chickens, and wanted to know if his bird fit the bill. He sent photos (above) and a video (below), where you can clearly see the different plumage and features on the right and left sides. The poor creature’s head feathers are missing in the photos because he/she was “nearly scalped” by some other chickens and needed stitches. [Update - the bird in the video is not Sanders' bird; it's a video he found from someone in New Zealand. Perhaps another collaboration! - Ed] Sanders asked whether the bird “should be donated to a university,” saying that “it would be a shame for him/her not to be shared.” I concurred. Clinton had contacted me after my original post and knowing that he was friendly and approachable, I suggested that Sanders contact him. Two nights ago, Sanders got back to me. Within days, Mike Clinton had replied to his email and the two men have enjoyed a productive exchange, which they were kind enough to share with me. It’s a wonderful series of messages that reveals a scientific collaboration in the making. It charts a conversation between two specialists – one in develomental biology and one in developing poultry - both trading knowledge, testing ideas, and speaking in simple language that the other less knowledgeable partner can understand (Clinton chuckled about this when I spoke to him). Clinton says that his first thought when he got Sanders's email was, "Hey another lucky break, you jammy beggar!" Many people had got in touch with him about the topic, "from schoolkids to retired scientists," and he even had a chat to a guy who had a collection of gynandromorph butterflies. But this was the first message he had recevied from someone who actually had an example of a chicken chimera. Clinton said that the bird is “almost certainly a gynandromorph.” He wrote to Sanders: