A question about shipped eggs

[Gypsy07]

I just had a rather poor hatch from shipped eggs. I had 10 eggs and before I set them I candled them. Most of the air cells looked a bit misshapen and also the shells looked a bit porous, you know that funny glowing speckly look the porous ones have when you hold them up to the light...

I candled at 9 days and had 10/10 fertile, but end up I had just two chicks hatch out. One of these was from an egg I'd marked as looking porous and I'm not sure about the other one as the chick totally demolished the shell getting out so I couldn't read the marks I'd made on it! I'm not sure if either of the chicks were from eggs with the funny looking air cells or not...

Anyway, I emailed the breeder I got them from, not to complain but just to let him know my results. I said to him it must just have been down to rough handling in transit. And he said he thought it was most probably an incubation problem, as eggs affected by rough handling would just not have developed at all.

Is that correct? I've never heard that before...

 

[Teach97]

if you got them to start development...I would tend to go with something during the incubation process. Now does that totally eliminate the problems associated with shipping? No...Did you have any other eggs hatching at the same time? I like to do this. then if all my eggs hatch and the shipped eggs do poorly...I have something for comparison...

 

[Gypsy07]

No, I didn't have any other eggs in there - my bator only holds 12 max!

So eggs can be bashed around a lot and still develop an embryo, but then have problems due to the rough handling. That's kinda what I thought. Mine did have very weird looking air sacs...

Thanks for the info!

 

[Wynette]

That's an interesting question; I would tend to think that rough handling would NOT allow a shipped egg to develop at all. I'm not completely sure, though. There are so many things that could have happened; it's very hard to know for certain what could have caused it.

 

[Katy]

I think shipping affects them from the moment they hit the postal system till hatch. Too many times I've had both my own eggs and shipped eggs in at the same time and had very different results from them. Just this last week I had a hatch of my own eggs and some shipped eggs. All but one of my eggs hatched while only 5 of the 14 shipped ones that made it to day 18 hatched. The only difference in the the incubating of those eggs were shipped vs. my own eggs. They were in the same incubator and hatcher, so same conditions for all 21 days.

 

[Lotsapaints]

Quote:
I don't have any of my own eggs but getting eggs from different sellers and hatching them together gives the same kind of results some hatch well and others not worth your time but same conditions so I say shipping can be very hard on the eggs. In my case finding eggs close is not easy so I've learned not to count on many hatching and when most of them hatch I celebrate

 

[Gypsy07]

Quote:
See, if that was the case then you would expect that after candling at, say, day 7 and discarding the non-starters, you would get the exact same percentage of chicks successfully hatching from shipped and non shipped eggs. Like, if you had 1000 each of shipped eggs and non shipped eggs (in a very big hypothetical bator!) candling fertile at 7 days, you would expect to end up with the same number of healthy chicks from each bunch. But from reading hundreds of posts on different forums about the problems people have with shipped eggs, that just doesn't seem to be the case...

It IS interesting though, isn't it? So many variables to think about...