KUALA LUMPUR: The Ayam Cemani – an inky black chicken native to Indonesia – is known by many names: “world’s most magical chicken”, “lamborghini of poultry”, “goth chicken” and “Sith lord” bird, among others.
There’s a reason this chicken is getting so much attention. As Jason Bittel writes for National Geographic, Cemani is perhaps the “most deeply pigmented creature” found in nature. Every aspect of his appearance, from his feathers to his beak, tongue, eyes and claws, is jet black.
This unusual coloring extends to the internal features of the breed, including its organs, muscles and bones; Plus, the chicken looks like it’s been “marinated in squid ink.” According to Gizmodo’s Rae Paoletta, the exception to this trend is Cemani blood and egg, which have more typical hues.
Cemans are far from the only black birds in the world, but as Kat McGowan reports for Nautilus, most of the darker fliers have pink tongues, brown eyes and normally colored guts. In total, only three other chicken breeds – Sweden’s Bohuslän-Dals svarthöna, Vietnam’s Black H’Mong and Silkie – share Cemani’s “inner blackness”, a condition known in scientific parlance as fibromelanosis or dermal hyperpigmentation. (Modern Farmer’s Laurie Woolever notes that the Silkie, a five-toed chicken whose black insides are covered in fluffy, cream-colored feathers, derives its name from the fur-like texture of its feathers.)
Leif Andersson, a geneticist at Sweden’s Uppsala University who led a 2011 study of the unusual phenomenon, tells National Geographic’s Bittel that fibromelanosis stems from a “complex rearrangement of the genome.” Crucially, Andersson adds, members of all four affected breeds can trace the mutation back to a single old chicken: “What’s interesting is that all chickens with this phenotype carry exactly the same mutation,” says Nautilus’ McGowan. “It suggests that some people saw these black birds and got excited about them, kept them, sold them and spread them around the world.”
According to Bittel, the variation occurs in a gene called endothelin 3, or EDN3. Normally, a specific group of cells in developing chicken systems use EDN3 to direct the migration of color-producing melanoblasts, but in hyperpigmented breeds, almost all chicken cells express EDN3. The result, Andersson explains, is “mismigration,” in which ten times more melanoblasts migrate to the “wrong place.”
Cemanis are difficult to obtain in the United States, where fears of bird flu have led to a ban on direct imports from the breed’s home country of Indonesia. As Ethan Harfenist notes for Vice, the going rate for a breeding pair was $2,000 around October 2014. At the time, the chicken was in such high demand that it was featured in New York magazine’s annual gift issue. Greenfire Farms, the best-known Cemani breeder in the US, currently sells day-old chicks for $199, but the much-admired hatchlings are rarely in stock.
