Tis Time for a March 2020 Hatch-a-long!

[CluckNDoodle]

I always do eggtopsies. Does anyone else here?

Yes, I eggtopsy almost every time. The exception to the rule is if i smell anything funky, lol.

 

[gmjarvi]

So, eggtopsies. Do you just crack open the egg and see what you find?

 

[julskinka]

So, eggtopsies. Do you just crack open the egg and see what you find?

Yup! I've never had a stinker, fortunately, but I guess it's a possibility. You could crack it into a ziploc bag if you're worried about it, but from what I've heard it should be obvious just by sniffing the egg.

I crack into a creme brulee dish (shallow, white). If it's completely clear I check to see if it was fertilized. If it's a quitter I compare it against this to see when it quit:

https://www.cobb-vantress.com/assets/bulkUpload/5299a8f23d/Chick-Embryo-Chart.pdf
If you read up on embryonic development you can also get a sense of if something is "off," but mostly it's just realizing the chick quit on D7 or whatever.

The most helpful eggtopsies are when you have death-in-shell (DIS) at hatch. Ideally you don't have any, but if you do, you can figure out if you've got malpositions (a common problem with shipped eggs, that doesn't necessarily preclude a live hatch, but can make it trickier), or your humidity was too high, or it was just a day 18 quitter, etc.

I find them fascinating, but I'm a biology/data nerd and not easily grossed out. (I've also done my own chicken necropsies, but that's a story for another thread).

 

[CluckNDoodle]

So, eggtopsies. Do you just crack open the egg and see what you find?

That depends, if it's an early quitter, yes, you just crack it in a bowl or plastic bag. There isn't much for me to see anymore in the early quitters, but when you're first getting started it may be helpful for you to see what it looks like at different stages of development.

Now for eggtopsies on or after hatch day I treat all of them like an assisted hatch just in case. This involves carefully opening the egg by the air cell without puncturing the membrane. I usually candle the egg, mark the air cell with a pencil, and gently score the shell in the center of the air cell with a screw. Once a hole is made I pick away at the shell at the air cell only. You can then apply coconut oil or warm water to the interior membrane with a q-tip to make the membrane translucent. You can usually tell at this point it the chick is still moving or not and then proceed either with an assisted hatch or an eggtopsy of an unhatched chick to determine what went wrong. This is an assisted hatch for a chick that pipped through a blood vessel and basically glued itself in (this is very uncommon normally even when pipping thorough a blood vessel they hatch without assistance) and an eggtopsy of a malposition facing away from the air cell that I did in the February hatch-a-long....sharing as "spoiler" so that people don't have to look if they don't want to.

Spoiler: Assist & Eggtopsy Malposition

Assisted hatch - pipped through blood vessel and got stuck from dried blood. Doing great!

Malposition - Face away from air cell.

 

[Jules929]

Yup! I've never had a stinker, fortunately, but I guess it's a possibility. You could crack it into a ziploc bag if you're worried about it, but from what I've heard it should be obvious just by sniffing the egg.

I crack into a creme brulee dish (shallow, white). If it's completely clear I check to see if it was fertilized. If it's a quitter I compare it against this to see when it quit:

View attachment 2032039
https://www.cobb-vantress.com/assets/bulkUpload/5299a8f23d/Chick-Embryo-Chart.pdf
If you read up on embryonic development you can also get a sense of if something is "off," but mostly it's just realizing the chick quit on D7 or whatever.

The most helpful eggtopsies are when you have death-in-shell (DIS) at hatch. Ideally you don't have any, but if you do, you can figure out if you've got malpositions (a common problem with shipped eggs, that doesn't necessarily preclude a live hatch, but can make it trickier), or your humidity was too high, or it was just a day 18 quitter, etc.

I find them fascinating, but I'm a biology/data nerd and not easily grossed out. (I've also done my own chicken necropsies, but that's a story for another thread).

Thank you for sharing!

 

[FortCluck]

Yes, I eggtopsy almost every time. The exception to the rule is if i smell anything funky, lol.

I do them in a Ziploc bag so that I don't have to smell anything

 

[julskinka]

Now for eggtopsies on or after hatch day I treat all of them like an assisted hatch just in case.

Yes, this exactly! I can't believe I forgot to mention. I guess I figured we'd probably go over it when we get closer to the date. Definitely be careful when it's a potential DIS.

If it is in fact dead, you basically want to remove the shell from around it so you can see whether it punctured the membrane, if the head is in the right position, etc. And if it's not dead, you want to give it a chance to still hatch!

 

[gmjarvi]

Wow! So much to learn. I have heard some stories of assisted hatching and it seems so intimidating. Hopefully I won't have to deal with it during my first go! But I'm glad you more experienced folks are here.

 

[julskinka]

Wow! So much to learn. I have heard some stories of assisted hatching and it seems so intimidating. Hopefully I won't have to deal with it during my first go! But I'm glad you more experienced folks are here.

It can be a little nerve-wracking. I always have to do at least one because some shipped egg decides to come out upside down like a dumdum (the actual name and circumstance of the bird in my avatar, actually) and gets stuck. I've also caught it when someone failed to pierce their membrane and would have drowned.

The trick is to go sloooooooooooow and keep things humid and moist and basically assist as little as possible to give them a chance to do it on their own. Jumping the gun with blood vessels that haven't receded or rushing the hatch is a good way to get your little buddy to bleed out or hatch with an unabsorbed yolk.

There's a good assisted hatch thread around here somewhere - it would be useful to bone up on the anatomy and structure of the membrane, and the orientation of the chick relative to the air cell.

 

[CluckNDoodle]

Wow! So much to learn. I have heard some stories of assisted hatching and it seems so intimidating. Hopefully I won't have to deal with it during my first go! But I'm glad you more experienced folks are here.

You always have the option of being completely hands off and letting nature take it's course. Many people hatch this way and there's nothing wrong with that. It's whatever you're more comfortable with!

I have plenty of experience assisting but I also typically wait until all of the other chicks have hatched successfully before I start poking around in any of the stragglers. This gives all of the other chicks the best chance to hatch without me fiddling with humidity by opening the incubator and it also gives me a better idea as the whether I'm stepping in too early or not.

I've been very fortunate to have not lost many chicks that are fully developed. I think 3 out of over 120 chicks last year. I'm starting to try to document both losses and assists better so I can help others in the process. For the hatch I'm doing this month I have a much higher likelihood of quitters and needing to assist because I'm knowingly setting eggs that would be considered "undesirable".

I posted the link earlier in this thread, but in case you didn't see it. I'm still going to update in this hatch-a-long as well but I didn't want to flood it with my experiment and it's also easier for me to keep track in a separate thread.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...s-aka-the-undesirable-egg-experiment.1349529/