Happy suicide?

[heliumbird]

Hello. my boyfriend incubated around 350 japanese quail eggs a few weeks back. around 250 hatched.
and here comes the twist.
they started dying.
they werent sick, or stressed, or starving or anything
They had enough space, a cool side (to hide from the heating side ) if they wished to.

They were seperated in 2 huge enclousers (inside a room since they were just newly hatched) and for some reason the first few days they were fine.
but after a week or so. they started squishing themselves to death.
they all went to rest in the corner and the more of them went there, the ones on the bottom were squished to death, and they didnt even want to flee
or anything, they happily sat there till they didnt die.

they started dying in huge numbers, around 10-15 a day sometimes even 20.
when they grew feathers they were moved into an outdoor enclouser, they still did the same thing for some reason.

Now they are around 50-80 of them (shocking i know) and they still do it, but only a small number dies now (1-2) since there is nearly none of them left now.


to add: my bf incubated 150 eggs before these and around 80 hatched only (some were physically retarded probably because they were incest eggs) the rest survived and didnt do that kind of thing at all. and they are adult now (over a month and a half now)


Does anybody have experience with this? Im in a vet. school. specialized on exotic animals but i tend to get around birds sometimes too but i never heard of anything like that.

 

[enola]

Were they in the corner that didn't have the heat lamp in it?

 

[Birdbrain Farm]

I'm sorry you lost so many. I believe your enclosure is supposed to be corner free, something round with no corners is preferable. I think I read about that happening on this site.

 

[heliumbird]

They were in 2 Corners, the one with the heat lamp and on the cool side,
There was no way of keeping them away from squishing eachother.

We checked them every hour and tried to keep them away from going into the corner but they still went there anyway.

and we didnt check them overnight of course since we were sleeping and thats when they had the chance to squish eachother to death.


When we turned off the heat lamp (we tried anything we could) they would squish themselves into the corner even more.

 

[SunHwaKwon]

Next time arrange the brooder so it doesn't have any corners. Also try dividing them further so even if they pile up only 20 or so will be piled instead of 100+. That's what I would do, at least.

 

[heliumbird]

we tried blocking the corners with bricks and such so they wont have any corners there.
but they would be piled up somewhere near and the ones on the bottom would start suffocating and die and were completely squished.
when i started pushing them away from eachother i found some of them still half alive, like they were paralyzed from not moving but they were still alive.
some would recover and some didnt feel their tiny legs anymore and had to be put down.

 

[TomNY]

.

 

[heliumbird]

thank you so much for your reply.
the first clutch we had with the 80 healthy ones didnt pile up at all.

But when there was like 100 in one brooder they would pile up no matter what and die very fast.

Its sad because they were all so healthy, i just dont understand the mass suicide.

 

[cmobley]

What kind of heat lamp were you using? What was the temp inside the brooder for the first week it needs to be 95-100. Dropping 5 degrees a week.

this is mine before heat lamp.

temp is at 97 degrees i use the big red heat bulbs.

 

[dc3085]

If theyre piling theyre cold or didnt have enough space to escape the heat and got too hot. Most likely the floor temp under the lamp was too high so they were struggling to corners to avoid it which led to them suffocating each other.