Air Cells too Small?

[Chicken_overlord]

Hello,

I'm incubating my first set of eggs. It has been so cool! Last night we candled on day 15 and could see on of the little one's feet against the shell. So cute!

Now onto the question. I'm struggling to figure out the humidity thing. I started with filling up the fill tray underneath the incubator which leveled the humidity at 55%. Discovering this was too much I started just adding a little water (which I eventually started measuring as 2 Tbsp) in the morning and evenings. This would cause it to go up to about 45% and then drop slowly back to 19-20%. According to the recommended weight loss of 13% at 18 days, my egg weights are now too low. However, when I look at the aircell lines on the eggs the aircells look too small for day 15.

E.g. Egg #1 started at 60g and was 51g at day 15 yesterday. According to the 13% estimation, egg #1 should weigh 52g at lockdown. It weighs 1g less than that 3 days too early. However, the egg cell looks a little small still. Here's a picture:

And here's egg #2 for a comparison:

And the marans x welsummer eggs who look like their aircells are even smaller, though I can't tell if that's just because of their shape:

I need some experienced suggestions, please. Should I up humidity to slow/stop the water loss or go by how the air cell looks?

 

[Susan Skylark]

You are way too into this! I thought me candling every day 3-12 was intense! Don’t worry too much about average or normal ranges, each eggs is an individual, your air cells are growing, your chicks are alive, your humidity has been fairly decent, relax and enjoy the hatch! I’ve intentionally hatched all incubation at 10 or 80% humidity just to see what happens, I only hatched 4-6 quail eggs per trial but all had 100% hatch rates. Not saying I recommend this as a hatching method! But there is natural variation between eggs, breeds, incubators, and each attempt. Guidelines are nice but your chicks won’t die if they are outside normal. My body temp is dyslexic, I’m always around 96.8, almost two degrees low compared to normal, but that’s normal for me, same with many variables in life and nature, enjoy you babies!