From World Bird Sanctuary

How do you tell if an egg is fertile? You look for the veins!

To see the veins, we do something called “candling.” It’s when you hold a bright light up to the egg in a dark room to see through the shell. You can get special egg lights, but a cell phone light usually works just fine. Veins usually start becoming visible as early as 3-5 days from laying, but the best time to check is usually closer to the 7 day mark. Fertile eggs will continue to darken as the embryo grows, and eventually will be too dark to really see anything as the embryo takes up more and more space in the shell.

You can see the difference between the infertile and fertile Great Horned Owl eggs pretty easily in these pictures.

Infertile

Fertile

    • anon6789@lemmy.worldOP
      7·
      1 month ago

      Agreed. I’ve read and watched egg videos, but when I found this picture it felt like something new to me.

      You guys hadn’t shown much interest in the egg stuff in the past, and we don’t have incubators at the clinic, so I had moved on from the subject, but this has renewed my interest.

      Here’s a growth chart showing development inside the egg. It’s a little creepy looking and I’m not sure if these are disected specimens or some type of imaging of viable embryos, so I’ll spoiler tag it as a precaution.

      Barn Owl Embryo Development

      Also somewhat interesting to note, this seemed more poultry specific, but for fertilized eggs that stop growing at some point and become non-viable, the common terminology seems to call them “quitters.” Not sure how I feel about that term, but I thought it was interesting in a “how humans handle things” way. 🐣

      • kamenlady@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 month ago

        It’s a little creepy looking

        Absolutely - i also didn’t expect the whole egg to have veins.

        I always thought you could see something small floating inside, through the light.

        • anon6789@lemmy.worldOP
          2·
          1 month ago

          Hah, I basically pictured the same thing. It’s probably safe to assume most of us are much more familiar with grocery store eggs rather than ones serving their intended purpose, so we think shell, whites, yolk, and maybe that little white stringy thing. But it makes sense it’s got to be much more complex if that actually is getting turned into a fully developed bird baby. There’s got to be a lot more stuff going on inside. It’s something I’ll have to learn more about. The more I learn about birds, the more alien they seem!