Egg inside Membrane....Pics

[Goat_Walker]

My aunt gets those sometimes - she calls them jelly eggs. We just throw em out and hope the next day brings a better breakfast.


edited for spelling

 

[ella]

You may find this site interesting. You're not the first!

http://www.browneggblueegg.com/Article.html

 

[mechagrue]

Super creepy! "Weird things passed by a hen," indeed!

I think you want this link, without the frames:

http://www.browneggblueegg.com/Article/ChristmasAlienEgg/ChristmasAlienEgg.html

 

[mechagrue]

Okay, I've spent the last 24 hours researching all about how eggs are formed. This is all very fascinating!

This page gives a great explanation of the process. The egg starts as a follicle on the chicken's ovary, which is described as "a bundle of grapes." Each grape is a follicle, which is attached to the ovary by a little stem. The follicles are what turn into the egg yolk, as it moves down the oviduct.

I also learned from a link on that Alien Egg page that eggs can indeed sometimes move backwards, up the oviduct. When this happens, the process of adding a layer can happen again.

Kind of like if you took your car to the automatic car wash, and threw it into reverse halfway through. Instead of doing Rinse -> Soap -> Wax-> Dry, your car would go Rinse -> Soap -> Wax -> Soap -> Wax-> Dry and get a second soap and layer of wax.

This is how you get a perfectly-formed egg inside a second eggshell. The egg goes all the way down the oviduct, then for some reason goes into reverse - and goes back through the last step, which is when the eggshell is added.

So here is what I think is happening:

1. Follicle drops from ovary into oviduct.
2. Follicle turns into egg yolk.
3. Layer of egg white (albumen) is added.
4. 2 membrane layers added.
5. Shell added.
6. Whoops! Oviduct goes into reverse gear, and backs up to step 4.
7. More membranes added.
8. Whoops! Oviduct kicks into high gear, egg skips going through step 5, and is sent straight out the chicken.

The membrane on the outside of your egg is therefore just an additional layer of the normal egg membranes. These are the things you encounter when you peel a hard-boiled egg. There is one membrane holding the yolk/egg white together, and one membrane laying inside the shell. The air space in an egg is a space between those two membranes.

I am still unable to account for the "stem." I suspect that the jelly eggs described by other posters are eggs which have skipped step 5, and have no shell. There are also of course soft-shelled eggs, where the shell doesn't have enough calcium to set properly.

Sorry to ramble on - probably more than you wanted or needed to know! Science geek here.

 

[realmofthewoodsranch]

EUW! I've gotten "jelly eggs" from the golden Comets, but never had a hard egg inside a memberane...

Do you eat them?

 

[RubberChickenLubber]

That's pretty much what I was thinking. I guess I have one hen who's system thinks it goofed sometimes.