Problem with incubator or infertile eggs? please help

[pinksapphire]

After a week of incubating duck eggs I could see nothing changing when candling them so cracked a few open and nothing had happened, this was my first attempt to incubate and I had borrowed an incubator and followed the instructions given to me.
Do you think it was a problem with the incubator or infertile eggs? I have attache an image below of the egg cracked open.
Any help would be much appreciated

 

[Ridgerunner]

That egg has the bull’s eye so it was fertile at one time. For some reason the embryo died. Many people think a clear egg means it was not fertilized. Not true at all. There are a lot of things that can cause clears.

I’m used to chicken eggs but duck eggs are similar. When the egg is first fertilized the embryo is alive and starts developing immediately. That’s why you can see the bull’s eye, that’s evidence of development. The inside of the hen or duck is the perfect temperature for incubation and it takes about a full day for the egg to go from fertilized to when it is laid. Even after it is laid the egg keeps developing but at normal storage temperatures that development is real close to zero. If it ever totally stops developing it dies.

Most of the time when a fertile egg doesn’t develop at all, it’s because of something that happened before the egg went into the incubator, but have you confirmed that your thermometer is reading correctly. Don’t trust any thermometer until it has been calibrated. It’s not unusual for some thermometers readings to be way off, including the ones that come with the incubator. Even if the temperature inside the incubator was several degrees cooler than you want you should see some development by now but it might be hot enough to have killed the embryo. Here are a couple of articles on calibrating a thermometer. If others have used that incubator and thermometer successfully, that’s probably not it.

Calibrate a Thermometer
http://www.allfoodbusiness.com/calibrating_thermometers.php

Rebel’s Thermometer Calibration
http://cmfarm.us/ThermometerCalibration.html

There are a few things that can kill an embryo before you start incubation. Most of them involve storage or temperatures. If you store it too long, even in perfect conditions, it can die. For chicken eggs stored in good conditions that is over two weeks, not sure what it is for duck eggs but I’d guess they are similar.

Temperatures too hot or too cold can kill the embryo. Another thing hard on them is temperature swings, alternating warming and cooling. The embryos are pretty tough and can take a surprising amount of abuse but they do have limits.

Shaking the eggs during transport or if they are mailed can cause clears, where they just don’t develop. I experienced that once when I brought home a bunch of hatching eggs on a rough country road and did not have them properly padded. 20 out of 30 were clears.

Disease and nutrition of the parent flock can also have an effect.

It’s impossible from here to say what went wrong. With my chicken eggs I generally don’t candle until at least Day 7 and even then don’t toss any. I’ve made mistakes when candling at that time, but you should have noticed development at five days when you opened them. There is something not right. Good luck figuring it out.

 

[pinksapphire]

Thank you so much for such a comprehensive answer it was really helpful