Egg was dead. Baby deformed.

[DierdreDreamwalker626]

So after a few days of me constantly bugging everyone on this forum about our mystery egg (lol) we now know that it was dead after all. :'( It started to smell and turn yellow and it looked like it was trying to mold. Now more questions begin. It was deformed.

The egg was a week over due to hatch. He had been growing normally and the egg itself appeared perfectly fine until about about a week and a half ago, until it began to become transparent. A little while ago we checked it again (after a week of worrying) and it was extremely apparent that it was in fact dead. We then decided to cut the egg open to investigate. To our surprise it was deformed. It's back legs were fused together ankle to thigh, it's face was shaped almost like a toad's (with it's nostrils being almost right up against it's eyes), and it had no tail or belly skin. As I said, the egg has seemed healthy almost all of the incubation period. It was incubated for male and other than a degree or two there hasn't been any temp fluctuations. What could have caused this? We really want to try to figure this out b/c we have more eggs of the same paring in the incubator and we want to make sure that this is not going to happen again. Any ideas and advice would be greatly appreciated.

(p.s: If knowing the parents would help: The mother is a F1 wild caught (looks like a normal) and the father is a normal, high yellow.)

 

[fl_orchidslave]

I've had an egg turn transparent, hatch, and all was well. But things don't always go the way we think they should.......... It could just been an underdeveloped baby, or there could be a genetic defect. You won't know until more hatch. If there's another deformity, please consider destroying the remaining eggs from that pairing, and if you can't determine who's passing bad genes, don't breed either of them again.

Also, it really isn't good for the eggs to be handling them excessively to photograph, etc. It also exposes them to temp fluctuation. They can be candled without picking them up, quickly and with minimal disturbance. All eggs don't hatch, for whatever reasons, but there's no good reason to increase the chance of something going wrong.

 

[ElapidSVT]

i wouldn't recommend destroying anything. jsut keep on keepin' on. incubator temperature fluctuations, random mutations, or just new breeders can cause malformations. i'd bet the next ones will be fine.

i had two eggs go a couple days long and both hatchlings had tail deformities, one a stumpy tail and the other was curly. all other hatchlings (70 or so) were normal. the deformed ones were unrelated. handling eggs or disturbing them is bad. excessive candling is probably bad. i know it's hard to just leave them be, but that's how it goes in the wild. eggs are completely undisturbed during incubation.

stuff happens, it'll get better.

 

[DierdreDreamwalker626]

I've had an egg turn transparent, hatch, and all was well. But things don't always go the way we think they should.......... It could just been an underdeveloped baby, or there could be a genetic defect. You won't know until more hatch. If there's another deformity, please consider destroying the remaining eggs from that pairing, and if you can't determine who's passing bad genes, don't breed either of them again.

Also, it really isn't good for the eggs to be handling them excessively to photograph, etc. It also exposes them to temp fluctuation. They can be candled without picking them up, quickly and with minimal disturbance. All eggs don't hatch, for whatever reasons, but there's no good reason to increase the chance of something going wrong.

We didn't handle it that much at all. I had picked it up once in order to take a picture to post (which didn't even work btw lol), but other than that we don't mess with our eggs. I'm too afraid that I'll hurt them. (lol) So, yea. I agree with you COMPLETELY on that one.

If the next clutch turns out the same way, then believe me, the others will be destroyed. That baby was so pitiful and I would not allow one to actually hatch like that b/c it obviously would only suffer and then die. I couldn't allow a living creature to go through that.

 

[lillith]

I'm sorry you lost the eggie.
It is really hard to not touch eggs the first year.

I hope everyone else hatches out okay!

 

[DierdreDreamwalker626]

i wouldn't recommend destroying anything. jsut keep on keepin' on. incubator temperature fluctuations, random mutations, or just new breeders can cause malformations. i'd bet the next ones will be fine.

i had two eggs go a couple days long and both hatchlings had tail deformities, one a stumpy tail and the other was curly. all other hatchlings (70 or so) were normal. the deformed ones were unrelated. handling eggs or disturbing them is bad. excessive candling is probably bad. i know it's hard to just leave them be, but that's how it goes in the wild. eggs are completely undisturbed during incubation.

stuff happens, it'll get better.

Thanks for the uplifting words. I'm hoping the next ones will be fine and that this was just some random case of this. If the next clutch turns out okay and healthy then we will go about what we are doing, but as I said above, if the next clutch turns out with the same problems, then I believe it will be in the babies' best interest to destroy the remaining. If it happens with the next ones then, IMO, it's not coincidental and I wouldn't want to let anymore go with the chance that they can be born like that and then suffer before an extremely miserable death. And if it does happen to the next clutch, then neither one of those parents will be bred, unless we can determine from which parent this deformity may have come.

So now all we can do is await the next clutch and see what happens.

 

[DierdreDreamwalker626]

I'm sorry you lost the eggie.
It is really hard to not touch eggs the first year.

I hope everyone else hatches out okay!

Thanks! I hope so as well, b/c I really don't want to see another one like that. It was so pitiful.