URGENT am i drowning my chicks?

I've got 18 eggs in my brinsea octagon 20 incubator and started getting some pips today (day 20) and one was starting to zip, suddenly it stopped moving completely and looking in to the egg there appeared to be a lot of water.

I opened it up and it looked dead


Humidity is currently at 70-72%, is this too high and the cause of the death of the chick? I have a few more pips and many more to go so i need to know what i need to do, i really don't want them to all die. Humidity was at 37-40% day 1-18

The humidity for the first 18 days is very high. Usually it should be around 30.

SilkieChickenLover336 said:

The humidity for the first 18 days is very high. Usually it should be around 30.

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Are you sure? From what I've read on here people like to keep it between 40-45 and brinsea themselves recommend 40-50%,mine would rarely hit 40 and spent most of the time at 38%.

Shamo123 said:

Are you sure? From what I've read on here people like to keep it between 40-45 and brinsea themselves recommend 40-50%,mine would rarely hit 40 and spent most of the time at 38%.

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I also use the low humidity incubation method, I have the same incubator and run between 25 to 30% days 1 to 18. I gradually increase the humidity during lock down to about 65%. I check aircell growth days 7. 14 and 18.

I run at 30% as well-usually. But I monitor my air cells throughout to know how to adjust. I wouldn't call 37-40 extremely high, but if your eggtopsies are showing a lot of excess fluid in them, that points to it having been too high. The egg wasn't able to loose enough moisture and during pip/zip he probably breathed in that excess fluid unfortunately. If you have others still alive unhatched, you might want to consider setting them up in cutdown cartons to hatch to help keep excess fluid down in the egg and watch them closely.

Edited to add, I use 75% at hatch.

chicapee said:

I also use the low humidity incubation method, I have the same incubator and run between 25 to 30% days 1 to 18. I gradually increase the humidity during lock down to about 65%. I check aircell growth days 7. 14 and 18.

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AmyLynn2374 said:

I run at 30% as well-usually. But I monitor my air cells throughout to know how to adjust. I wouldn't call 37-40 extremely high, but if your eggtopsies are showing a lot of excess fluid in them, that points to it having been too high. The egg wasn't able to loose enough moisture and during pip/zip he probably breathed in that excess fluid unfortunately. If you have others still alive unhatched, you might want to consider setting them up in cutdown cartons to hatch to help keep excess fluid down in the egg and watch them closely.

Edited to add, I use 75% at hatch.

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I'm actually now not so sure if the humidity levels i stated were accurate, i hatched a lot of quail using the same incubator with the same humidity levels, i had a few shrink wrapped ones and upon checking it with a different hygrometer the one on the brinsea was reading 8% too high, i calibrated it but i couldn't remember if i reset it to factory defaults, i tried the same hygrometer and they were reading identical so i figured i had left the brinsea calibrated.

I just reset the incubator to factory defaults and the humidity didn't change, i will do the salt test with the hygrometer to see if that's off now.

I've got another pip and some peeping but im worried they will die too, I'm throwing tissues in there to drop the humidity but it isn't working too well.

Seems that my hygrometer was off, I'm running the salt test on it now and it's already reached 80% (should be 75%).

Seems the humidity isn't too high and now I'm worried that the constant opening of the incubator to lower it will negatively affect the pipped eggs.

So anyone got any idea what happened to the dead chick? One thing i forgot to mention was that there was what looked to be some unabsorbed yolk in the egg.

More pictures of the dead chick

Is it possible that your temps were a bit low as it looks like the egg sack was not absorbed. It may have just been a late death which can happen. How many left to hatch?

chicapee said:

Is it possible that your temps were a bit low as it looks like the egg sack was not absorbed. It may have just been a late death which can happen. How many left to hatch?

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No definitely not low, it's set at 37.8C.

I had another one hatch an hour or so after the dead one, it went from pip to hatch pretty quickly but that also had what looked like some unabsorbed yolk/whites and a crooked toe, can't see if it's still crooked though.

There are 2 that pipped and zipped last night but not made any progress since so. i think they may be shrink wrapped due to opening tye incubator a few times (albeit quickly) when i thought the humidity was too high.