Day 25 Turkey eggs Splitting!

[MrWrong]

I am hatching turkey eggs. Today (day 25) when I took the eggs off the turner I noticed 2 out of 30 eggs cracked in a bit of a spider web formation. See picture. With candling I could determine that both had living embryos.

Eggs are from a big producer and of the meat variety.

Humidity has been monitored and controlled. As of this morning moisture loss was 12.4%.

Can anyone shed light on this?

Thx

Blaine

 

[chooks4life]

Since you've been controlling humidity, there goes my first possible theory. It appears to me that the chicks may have grown too large for the eggs, but I've never heard of that happening.

Not sure what's going on, sorry, but best wishes with it.

 

[MrWrong]

I still have no clue what happened to the two split open eggs I had. This morning marks day 27. The one split egg hatched overnight. This is the first to hatch. Seems healthy.

I am concerned that I had too much humidity and the chicks are oversized and maybe combined with weak shells caused the splitting.

Though I say I am concerned with humidity I monitored it closely. I used egg weight lost to keep taps instead of the size of the air sac. The air sacs are quite a bit smaller than recommended but the mass loss is slightly over recommended.

Insight would be appreciated.

Blaine

 

[chooks4life]

I'm very sorry to be unable to assist you, as I have never used incubators. With the mass loss being over recommended though one would think this even unlikelier still an occurrence. It'd make more sense if it was under, but I've hatched chicks from eggs that were under recommended mass loss; it was no problem, the eggs didn't split. But these I let the hens hatch, only assisting if the chicks couldn't hatch unassisted, it wasn't an incubator job, but after hatching hundreds of chicks you get a feel for which eggs are not developing correctly.

However I do believe you are most likely dealing with a genetic trait here. I don't know of anything else that could cause an embryo to exceed its environment capacity, except disease, but that isn't too likely here I think. Breeding for rapid size gain could conceivably cause the embryo to exceed egg size, after all it works that way in mammals too when they've been bred for rapid size gain. They reach a stage where the embryo's excessive development threatens the integrity of its environment. I know comparing mammals and avians is technically incorrect but there are some parallels.

You're in the right forum, someone who knows something specific about this should come along and answer, but if they don't it's probably because they don't know. It's certainly a strange occurrence.

Are all the eggs from the same hen and tom? If you are unable to find information on this, repeating the breeding would possibly shed some light on the genetic theory. There's a lot of things that don't make sense until your breeding records are in good order, really invaluable stuff. If you bought the eggs though that's not going to help you too much, unless you contact the hatchery and ask if anyone else has reported this or if they know what it is.

All the best.