Black sliver in egg

[BirdMan32]

Thank you in advance for your responses. One of our 10 hens is a Deleware pullet that has been laying for around a week or so & the eggs are raher small (normal). Today we boiled a one of her eggs & it had a black sliver on the yolk.

Meat spot, blood spot, something else? Thanks!

 

[gritsar]

I'm thinking meat spot.

 

[BirdMan32]

Is the meat spot harmful to eat? We do have a rooster & he certainly has mated with all the chickens of age.

 

[Rocky Road]

Do you pick the eggs everyday? the black sliver sounds like an egg that has been incubated for a few days . . .

I think there is a link on this site that shows candled eggs at each day of incubation and after a few days its a blood line (that's all), I'm assuming its a cooked blood line. I think it would be fine to eat.

 

[jpcode]

I vote you have a fertilised egg. If it were raw it would be a red dot so boiled it might be black. It is fine to eat.

 

[Cindy in PA]

Red dots have nothing to do with fertilization. It is just a meat spot.

 

[Whittni]

Eww, meat spots sound gross, why do they happen?

 

[Rocky Road]

fertilized eggs can have a line. . . which I thought was a sliver. If it is just a spot then its still fine to eat, some chickens have a small tiny defect in their laying system and will have a small blood clot in their eggs. No biggie though.

 

[kari_dawn]

can you show us a picture of the sliver?

 

[Tracydr]

Meat spots are simply tiny ruptured capillaries, a little speck of blood. They can decrease hatching, if there are a lot of them in eggs you're trying to hatch. I've found there are more in brown layers than white. It seems that if they get plenty of dark greens (vitamin K) it will pretty much go away completely. I never had any on my free range chickens, except a little in the dead of winter.