Eggtopsy (with pics) - why did it die?

[ackie]

before we get into the sad (eggtopsy pics at bottom if you wanna skip)

I had 4 out of 5 healthy unassisted hatches! my 5th egg did not hatch.


(ignore the thermometer, still dialing in the right height on the heat lamp)

this clutch was originally 14 eggs, under a broody so I didnt know when they started, on the ground during a cold snap. one late morning I went to check on her and she was gone. rip broody. i dont know how long the eggs were unattended. 3 had rolled out of the nest but it was otherwise undisturbed. I brought the eggs inside and fired up the incubator which had some calibration issues at first but then settled down.

i removed 9 after a couple/few days. some looked unfertilized, one had a textbook blood ring...

I never actually went into lockdown but my humidity has been high the past few days just by happenstance. I actually went to candle to post update pics and there were two fully hatched chicks sitting in there.

on to the egg who did not live:

this is a pic from the 11th

it looked more full than the other ones & I thought being able to see less veins (but still some) meant it was more developed - too much chick to see clearly - but I didnt actually pick it up

today candling

today eggtopsy

are the white specks between the shell and the membrane normal?
any idea why it died?

 

[ChickenCanoe]

It looks like it wasn't done developing and at least wasn't ready to hatch.
Dead embryos past day 18 are quite common. It can be as simple as the time the eggs spent on the wet ground without a hen and that is quite likely.
It can be from any type of contamination like fungus or bacteria. Nutritional deficiencies are a common cause of late quitters - enough nutrition to make a table egg but not enough to give an embryo the food needed to make it to term or vigor to escape.
There are many other causes at that stage but from what you describe those are most likely.
Not all embryos that develop make it.

Without a huge trained neonatal staff and millions of dollars of equipment, there are lots of babies that wouldn't survive.

 

[ackie]

It looks like it wasn't done developing and at least wasn't ready to hatch.

I should have specified that it was dead when I opened the shell, not alive - no movement or heartbeat.

But yeah, I've always chalked it up to "dont count your chickens before they hatch", but wasnt sure if this was one of those cut and dry cases of "oh you did xyz wrong".

I figured the lack of hen was why the 9 quit but didnt consider that it could have affected this guy too.

 

[ChickenCanoe]

Not cut and dried - and rarely is. A breakout/eggtopsy is an educated guess.
I didn't mean to imply it died when you opened it. I meant it was an embryo that died >day 18.