squirrelgirl01
Songster
- Feb 2, 2022
- 50
- 115
- 101
Hello all! I'm in urgent need of advice for the clutch of eggs I'm currently incubating. For starters, I'm not a chicken expert. I don't own any and I've never incubated eggs before. It's a very long and complicated story how this came to be, but to sum it up: my cousin owns a farm. I'm vegan, but decided to eat eggs from his chickens because they're well cared for. A few months into this arrangement, I cracked an egg that had a formed, decomposing chick inside. No idea how this happened, but it made me wonder how many OTHER less obvious fertile eggs he'd been sending me to eat, so I did a ton of research and bought an incubator to experiment with a dozen.
All 12 were fertile, some were quitters, and I was left with 8 fertile eggs. Today is Day 19, and as of candling them on Day 17, they appeared to be developing normally and were absolutely alive. Here's where the problem comes in.
Yesterday, Day 18, I was following directions to start lockdown. Part of those directions are raising the humidity. I'd been adding water to the reservoirs in the incubator (Little Giant still air styrofoam) every few days or so and the humidity gauge was always maintaining around 50-55% so I didn't think too much about it. But no matter how much water I added to raise the humidity, the humidity meter didn't go up. After a few hours I came to a startling realization: something was wrong with the temperature/humidity reading. I immediately bought a reptile thermometer/hydrometer as well as a regular glass thermometer and added them to the incubator. The humidity reading was great, but the problem: The temperature was only 91 DEGREES! The glass thermometer reads it as 94, which isn't realistically better. The incubator thermometer has been maintaining (supposedly) between 99.5-100.5 degrees.
I know this is really bad, and I spent the rest of yesterday panicking about it. Adjusting the incubator temperature up a few degrees didn't do much. I decided when I woke up this morning I should seek advice and joined these forums.
The babies looked healthy enough to me based on pictured and videos I watched on Day 17. Throughout incubating they'd developed good veining, I've seen eyeballs and kicking, and the last time I candled the eggs were getting pretty filled up by them. Do they have any chance of hatching and surviving with little to no deformity or health problems? Do miracles happen and they'll just be late? Or should I expect them to pass away pre-hatch or be born with issues that make them incompatible with life?
All 12 were fertile, some were quitters, and I was left with 8 fertile eggs. Today is Day 19, and as of candling them on Day 17, they appeared to be developing normally and were absolutely alive. Here's where the problem comes in.
Yesterday, Day 18, I was following directions to start lockdown. Part of those directions are raising the humidity. I'd been adding water to the reservoirs in the incubator (Little Giant still air styrofoam) every few days or so and the humidity gauge was always maintaining around 50-55% so I didn't think too much about it. But no matter how much water I added to raise the humidity, the humidity meter didn't go up. After a few hours I came to a startling realization: something was wrong with the temperature/humidity reading. I immediately bought a reptile thermometer/hydrometer as well as a regular glass thermometer and added them to the incubator. The humidity reading was great, but the problem: The temperature was only 91 DEGREES! The glass thermometer reads it as 94, which isn't realistically better. The incubator thermometer has been maintaining (supposedly) between 99.5-100.5 degrees.
I know this is really bad, and I spent the rest of yesterday panicking about it. Adjusting the incubator temperature up a few degrees didn't do much. I decided when I woke up this morning I should seek advice and joined these forums.
The babies looked healthy enough to me based on pictured and videos I watched on Day 17. Throughout incubating they'd developed good veining, I've seen eyeballs and kicking, and the last time I candled the eggs were getting pretty filled up by them. Do they have any chance of hatching and surviving with little to no deformity or health problems? Do miracles happen and they'll just be late? Or should I expect them to pass away pre-hatch or be born with issues that make them incompatible with life?
