Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have a three egg clutch from a het lavender to a 50% het lavender female. They are on day 32 in the incubator and one egg seems to be shriveling up pretty bad. The egg is still good and I have tried several things to try and rehydrate it but nothing seems to work. I had an idea and was wondering if it had ever been tried. I'm assuming that there is not enough liquid or egg white inside the egg for whatever reason so would it be possible to inject some kind of liquid or even the egg white of a freshly hatched egg into the shriveled egg to plump it back up and make sure that it doesn't completely shrivel up and go bad? I hope this doesn't sound to rediculous but I really want to save this egg. Any input or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Your substrate looks way too wet, place the egg on top of an plastic grill, your egg will then avoid absorbing too much moisture and your medium can then be saturated with water, it avoids the guessing game altogether.

Good luck

What do the other eggs look like? If they are fine, I would think it is the egg, not the method. Sometimes you can't help it. Don't inject anything in the egg. As far as the substrate being too wet, when you squeeze it hard, it should clump well and maybe a little water run out, not much. You can cover the egg with moist newspaper.

Thanks for the replies. One of the three eggs looks perfect and one is
slighly dimpled and then this one is pretty bad looking. I moistened the
vermiculite around the dry looking egg and laid a moist paper towel over it but it doesn't seem to be getting any better. I was just ready to try anything to save the egg. Ill keep an eye on it for improvements but it doesn't look good. Thanks again!
One more question, so the egg could be just going bad regardless of whether the vermiculite is at the proper moisture level? If the egg is indeed going bad is it possible to determine if the baby is or isn't an albino if I were to cut it open? I won't cut it open unless it's for sure gone.

One of the last things to come in is color. I have seen under developed dead babies that looked pink or almost purple. It depends on when it died, if it did. I have seen some really crummy looking eggs hatch. Don't get them too wet either, a big change isn't good either. That egg doesn't look that bad. It isn't going to plump back up like magic.

I have hatched them that looked worse,leave it alone.Candle it for veins and if it looks OK then it is .Terry

I have had some absolutely horrifying looking eggs hatch out perfectly healthy babies. I have some in the incubator now that have looked a little deflated for several weeks, and they're still alive and developed and will be hatching soon. I hatched a butter this year out of an egg that looked bad from when it was laid and was actually green and fuzzy when it hatched. If your other eggs look ok, it's not your methods. You can put some moist newspaper over the egg, but just let it go until it's absolutely certian that it is dead.
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Ummm, just trying to kinda help here.....

I had a bad dehydrated looking clutch last year.... It was my first clutch.

You could probably look up my past posts and see the eggs.

I did notice that they REALLY started to go bad when "I" was opening the incubator and "fussing" too much?
Although, throughout the incubation all eggs looked dehydrated, even though they were practically sitting on top of a crate on top of soaked ( I mean SOAKED) vermiculite/perlite.

For the most part, the eggs went as they should untill the end...... And at the end, some things prob. happened....
#1- my curiousity opened the incubator too much
#2- my curiousity messed with the controls too much
#3- as the embryos grew- there wasn't a sufficient "something" - being space/O2/humidity/consitent temps/etc.....
#4- the temps/humidity weren't what I "thought" they were........may be it was colder than what the thermostat said?

All in all,,,, I had 2 VERY-CLOSE to FULLY-FORMED Babies that didn't make it. I had one VERY healthy baby, that is eating like a champ today.

BTW - The one egg that did hatch looked slightly worse than yours.... So HAVE HAPPY HOPE!

GOOD LUCK!

The clutch:

The egg that hatched:

The baby: