Help! What Happened To My Turkey Hatch?

~~~~Hi all you guys! I have been stalking this site for a while and find all of your comments and suggestions very helpful. Thank you very much for letting me join! I need some help in figuring what went wrong with this hatch. The odds were stacked against me from the get-go. Total newbee; Two young hens and tom (bronze); eggs kept on kitchen counter and not turned before incubation; started incubation on Nov. 22nd (late fall) with 12 turkey eggs in a new Farm innovations 4200 with auto turner; checked temp with 3 different thermometers . Some eggs were marked with a sharpie (learned from you guys that’s a no-no Candled using pictures from BYC as a reference; Ended up with 2 clear and 2 ringers over the course. Kept humidity around 50%+/- till lock down on day 24 (the 16th of Dec.)Move them out of the turner then raised RH to 65% +/-. Chicks were due to hatch on Dec. 20th (day 28) Nothing. Left them alone 4 more days (Dec 24) then gave up. I wanted to do a necropsy to see what I had or didn’t have. Well, here are pictures. All the eggs seem to be at different stages of development. What’s up with that? By the way, these eggs were put outside to stay cool till I could get to them for necropsy (5 days) they didn’t smell or look rotten ~~~THESE PICTURES ARE GRAPHIC !~~ But I hope someone can tell me what might have gone wrong! Thank you in advance for your help.


^^^These turkey eggs all were incubated for the same amount of time but are all in different stages of development.




Egg 1^^^Both pictures of the same egg. This appears to be the farthest along. The rest are in order of development as far as I can tell.


Egg 2 ^^^

Egg 3 ^^^~~These 2 pictures are the same egg.


Egg 4 ^^^


Egg 5 ^^^

Egg 6 ^^^

Egg 7 ^^^

Egg 8 ^^^

SORRY! These pictures are graphic! But I hope someone can tell me what might have gone wrong! Thank you in advance for your help. SonriseRanch

Eggs can go into a dormant sort of status where they can cope with temperatures being too low to develop. Until it's actually pipping the shell, a truly healthy embryo can cope with going into stasis overnight in winter, every night of its brood period. (Not that I'm talking about a winter that freezes things solid, just an Aussie winter, which can frost grass where I am, but that's about it). Subzero but not by too many digits.

They can take a month or longer to hatch, even chicken eggs, if they are only heated a few hours a day but are healthy enough to cope with the cold prolonged interim periods. I think perhaps their circumstances may have set them back and some may have hatched if you'd left them longer. It's simply not true that a healthy egg requires constant heat of a certain level. Eggs from parents with sub par health, however, need every mollycoddling they can get and even then will have a high failure rate. The health of both parents accounts for a lot, even the majority, of your egg hardiness and hatchability issues, and even the grandparents and great grandparent's health statuses show an impact.

Some were obviously early deaths in your clutch there. This could all be due to vitamin or mineral insufficiency, a fleeting illness in the parents which deprived them of necessary nutrients or toxified and damaged their reproductive cells prior to this clutch being created... Even if you saw no noticeable ill health.... It could have been a badly timed worming... It could also have been a bacterium from your benchtop, handling, or similar, which invaded the eggs and killed most or even all of the embryos. So many things can go wrong I can't say for sure what this is. But better luck with your next clutch.

Thank you so much for your reply! I have started a new clutch 5 days ago. This time I will let it go longer. Do you have any suggestions for how to handle the "lockdown" part of raising the humidity? I'm a newbee and have no experience. This will be my second try. Again, thanks so much for your help! Hope you have a fair dinkum day!

SonriseRanch

I'm sorry, I haven't ever used an artificial incubator so I have no ideas on that score. But there are plenty of threads on this site with many people asking similar questions to you. If you search for the key words you ought to find something helpful.

You have a fair dinkum day too.