Checking air cells on shipped eggs?

[Godiva]

What am I looking for and how do you recognise a detached air cell, and then what do you do? Can they still hatch ok? Thanks.

 

[ChickieBooBoo]

If you candle the egg you'll be able to see it floating freely around the egg instead of staying at the large end where it should. When you recieve the eggs you should store them pointy end down for 12-24 hours to try and settle the air sac. Sometimes it works, most times (at least for me) at doesn't.

 

[yinepu]

for detached air cells you need to leave them pointy side down for the entire incubation.. laying the egg on it's side will pretty much guarantee that it won't hatch if the air cells remain detached..

but as a note.. i have had eggs arrive with badly detached air cells which did not reattach by letting them sit for 48 hours.. so I just go ahead and incubate them standing up and letting the auto turner turn them.. many times the eggs will go ahead and form chicks and eventually hatch if everything else during the incubation goes according to plan

 

[Gypsy07]

My last batch of shipped eggs, I had 18, all with wonky air cells. Only 6 of them developed - the other 12 were totally scrambled - and three of those were early quitters. The last three went on to hatch unassisted and were perfectly healthy chicks. Like Yinepu says, I incubated them upright, in my Brinsea. For lockdown, I put them in cut down egg cartons so they would stay upright throughout the hatch.

As a side note, I find the ones with wonky air cells MUCH more difficult to candle and tell what's going on. They usually look more murky to me. Those three that hatched, I was half sure they were goners when I went into lockdown. Comparing them with the control group of eggs from my own birds, I didn't have a clue what was going on in there! So if you end up with some like that, don't be too quick to want to toss them.