The post-hatch necropsy (is this a thing?)

[Susan Skylark]

I’ll admit right off the batch I’m a little weird, I love the process, the mystery, the why, and learning what you can from mistakes and failures, which is why I over candle my eggs and open up anything that isn’t ‘normal.’ Which means my non-hatching eggs from this recent batch get opened up. After getting past the imagined horror of opening rotten eggs, I was actually surprised to find they don’t stink (assuming no bacterial infiltration of course) even after 2 weeks of being dead. Of 27 eggs in lockdown 2 never pipped and one pipped but never progressed after everything else hatched. I also had to assist one deformed long term zipper. I candled all three duds, the two non-pippers weren’t completely opaque and with no cracks in the shell I did water candle them but no movement was observed. Both contained a dead day 12-ish embryo, I candled day 13 before lockdown but had no way to differentiate the dead embryos from the live ones so not much to change there. The other was cracked/pipped so no water candling for him, regular candling was completely dark, even the air cell. Opened the egg as I was done incubating no matter what and found a dead internally pipped chick, pictured in another post. Overall pretty cool! Maybe this isn’t for everyone but it can teach you a lot about life and the process of incubation and embryogenesis!

 

[Nabiki]

There have been egg necropsies posted before. They are quite interesting and worth learning from.

 

[Susan Skylark]

Totally agree, not trying to reinvent the wheel just encourage the average incubator to consider it if they never have!

 

[JacinLarkwell]

I do it on incubator hatches. Don't bother with broody eggs though. Got some cool specimens over the years, and it makes me feel better when I see that there was something wrong woth the chick and that it was best it didn't survive hatching

 

[Susan Skylark]

I love the mutants too! Never seen it personally but in cattle you can see two heads on a 40 day ultrasound. Saw a calf with six legs once, two grew along his spine just above the shoulders, first and last time I can say I amputated 2 legs on a calf and he did great! Fascinating stuff out there!