Broiler chickens, destined for the dinner table, are four times bigger than half a century ago, says Vox, which summarizes a paper in Poultry Science with the headline “Chickens have gotten ridiculously large since the 1950s.” Breeders created chicken that are bigger and three times more efficient in converting feed into meat but also carry some skeletal, metabolic and immune system problems. Scientists in Canada raised chickens from representative breeds from 1957, 1978 and 2005 to see how much they ate and how big they grew for the Poultry Science paper.
If their reputation was not enough, goats proved their ability as four-legged weed whackers with “iron-clad tongues and guts” in a study of methods to control an invasive reed, Phragmites australis, that grows up to 10 feet tall in salt marshes along the East Coast, says the Atlantic’s City Lab. Based on results from test pens, they say goats could reduce weed coverage by half in as little as three weeks. Since herbicides are not involved, native grass has a chance to grow back. The study appeared in the journal PeerJ and is available here.