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Well I have had a simple way to tell if a egg is bad for the last 8-10 years that I have been breeding.

MAGGOTS=BAD

Well two nights ago I found maggots on a egg in a clutch that is due to hatch in the next day or 2. So I grabbed the eggs out seperated the bad egg and put in new incubation medium. Pretty straight foward. I am always interested in what stage of development the egg goes bad so I cut it open.

Now this egg looked good for 2/3rds and on the last third on the tip it was not fully calcified and had a bit of mold on the very tip. The maggots where on this tip on the bottom of the egg. When I cut it open I saw the blood vessels and the yolk sack and the baby inside the yolk and inner (IDK) egg membrane or egg white I guess. I saw the baby was a tri color (Het for albino hondo) and then noticed that the tip where the maggotts where was sorta segmented off from the rest of the interior of the egg. I figured the baby was dead still so I began to pull him out of the egg and he moved.

Oh crap oh crap oh crap... now what??? I put him on wet paper towels in a deli and left him alone. I tried putting him back in the egg and he came back out. He is pretty laid back, you know because he is supposed to be in a egg still, and he is still attached to the yolk by his umbilical cord at this point. Fast foward to today and he is still alive and off the yolk. He seems to have gained a little weight from the yolk, but not as much as he should have. He is still laid back, you know because he is STILL supposed to be in the egg, but more active. I think he is gonna make it because it was so close to his hatch date but man.

Maggott do not always egual bad egg

That is the lesson. Wash them off and wait it out.

Later Jason

last year i cut open an egg that looked like 40 miles of bad road. well, once i got in there there's this king and it moved. ARRRRRRGH. not far enough along to survive my bad. it was a patternless or near patternless ghost brooksi too.
i never cut eggs before and haven't again, i don't know what was with the temporary madness.
daveb

...in the few minutes that have passed since we talked, I have gone to my snake room to find 2 amel corns hatched from a clutch of 4 bad eggs. 2 obviously were, but there wasn't that much visual difference in them and 2 were stones for sure. I even thought that the babies had to be twins since I wouldn't have given you a dime for 3 out of the four. Turns out two were good in the end... they were so solid looking and gross you could not have candled them.
I know they're not kings but ever since I had a mexicana hatch from a cast off egg (it HAD to be bad!lol!) I don't toss eggs until the season is long over...haha
Now to figure what the little guys are... father is sunglow albino het/anery and mom is snow striped motley...
:Mark
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Surrender Dorothy!

www.crimsonking.funtigo.com

I always slice em up to see what is going on inside and this is the first time I have been wrong, but then again I don't have your amount of experience. If I did maybe I could sell my stuff for as much as those other guys LOL (inside joke) I feel really bad for putting this little fellow through this. He is way skinny for a hondo but maybe that will make him a better feeder right off the bat. I have always thought that the reason alterna don't feed out of the egg is because they hatch so fat. Maybe I got the answer... cut them out 5 days early... No don't, really.

Later Jason

I just went through similar circumstances with my GBK eggs. All of the eggs looked swolen, so I wasn't sure they were too moist or not. One started rotting and looked real bad. It hatched out a couple days later than the rest. I'll never toss an egg until way overdue, even then I'm not sure. Derek