Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vocal Bomb here. It's not often that
Speaker 1: you look at an animal and think, I bet all
Speaker 1: the goth kids wish they had a chicken like that.
Speaker 1: Meet the Ayam Chamani, the Peter Murphy or Robert Smith
Speaker 1: or Lydia Diets or Darth Vader of chickens, pick your
Speaker 1: pop culture reference. All visible parts of this chicken's exterior feathers, beak, tongue, comb,
Speaker 1: and talons are black, and it would seem as if
Speaker 1: the darkness should end there, but not so. It's inky
Speaker 1: exterior is just a teaser for the darkness within. It
Speaker 1: turns out the bones, organs, and muscles of the i
Speaker 1: M Chamani are all black as well, which, in addition
Speaker 1: to their rarity, explains why these birds are so popular
Speaker 1: amongst chicken aficionados. They're also dubbed the Lamborghini of poultry
Speaker 1: because the going price for these guys can range between
Speaker 1: two hundred dollars for a single egg layer hen and
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars for a full grown mating pair. Native
Speaker 1: to the Indonesian island of Java, the i Am Chimani
Speaker 1: has been used in rituals and kept as status pets
Speaker 1: by the elite. Four centuries they were thought to have black,
Speaker 1: enchanted blood that could lift curses or heal ailments, and
Speaker 1: strangely enough, the blood is one of the only obviously
Speaker 1: normally pigmented things about these birds, aside from their cream
Speaker 1: colored eggs. But when you look at an i Am chamani,
Speaker 1: the superstitions around its being magicals seem completely rational, because
Speaker 1: this chicken is gorgeous in the sunlight. Their plumage isn't
Speaker 1: matte black like a charcoal briquette, It's iridescent like a
Speaker 1: Hubble telescope rendering of a nebula in deep space. Like
Speaker 1: looking into the most hypnotic oil covered petal in the
Speaker 1: mall parking lot. These chickens are complete knockouts. But why
Speaker 1: what could possibly cause a chicken's flesh and bones to
Speaker 1: appear to have been pickled? In India ink. It turns
Speaker 1: out i Am Chimani is the world's most extreme example
Speaker 1: of a condition called dermal hyperpigmentation or fibro melanosis. Three
Speaker 1: other chicken varieties have this condition to varying degrees. The
Speaker 1: silky bantam, the Vietnamese kamong and the Swedish swart Juna,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't find pronunciations on those last two. I
Speaker 1: hope I didn't butcher them too terribly. Research published revealed
Speaker 1: that this genetic condition causes strange behavior in chicken embryos.
Speaker 1: Precursors to melanocytes, which are the cells that produce the
Speaker 1: pigment melanin, the same pigment that gives our human hair, eyes,
Speaker 1: and skin dark color. Usually, the precursors to melanocytes in
Speaker 1: chicken embryos wind up in just the skin and eyes
Speaker 1: of the developing birds, But in chickens with fibro melanosis,
Speaker 1: those precursors travel throughout all the tissues of the embryo,
Speaker 1: and what's more, they don't shut down at the usual stage. Instead,
Speaker 1: they continue to multiply, creating way more melanocytes than usual,
Speaker 1: which leads to the hyperpigmentation that we see in these
Speaker 1: birds once they hatch. Strangely enough, scientists believe that the
Speaker 1: mutation that leads to fibro mellanosis and chickens is so
Speaker 1: unusual that it most likely happened only once in a
Speaker 1: single bird that lived thousands of years ago. No one
Speaker 1: knows how the gene transfers to the globe from one
Speaker 1: jet black Bird, but Marco Polo wrote in twelve about
Speaker 1: black boned chickens while he was traveling in Asia, so
Speaker 1: the gene probably made its way around the world via
Speaker 1: trade roots. Interestingly, even though the flesh of the i
Speaker 1: Am Chamani looks strange, it reportedly tastes just like chicken.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was by Jescelin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more on this and months of other
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