Im a little worried...

[sprdonkey]

I am a little worried about our eggs, beautiful first time clutch. We have started to see these very dark spots on a few of the eggs. They are opaque, if a light is shined on them it illuminates the inside's of the eggs well enough to see a lot of veins. The eggs were laid on 4/25 though, shouldn't we see something besides veins in the eggs by now? My other question is this, when incubating in vermiculite for example as we are, which is more important when the two won't balance out, substrate temperature or air temperature. The humidity has stayed optimal and the eggs are very supple but we have had three instances now where the air temp inside the egg box reached a little over 90 degrees briefly, on one of those occasions the substrate temp got a wee bit high but temps never stayed that high for long.
..We were into the 5th week I think before we started to have probs. The eggs are not cooked but...Do you think that they are alright?

 

[bitsy]

Well they cretainly look perfectly healthy from the outside.

Having been laid on 25th April, you should be within a week or so of hatching, so yes, I'd expect to see more than veins. Are you absolutely sure that there's nothing else in there? I can't really see from those pics.

If you want to risk disturbing one, try picking it up and holding the light behind it, then look through the egg towards the light. That should give you a better idea of what's going on inside. But at this stage in the game, taking them out of the vermiculite could be dodgy.

I'd be inclined to just hang in there and see what happens over the next couple of weeks. It would be very unusual to get eggs that look that good after nearly two months, without being properly fertile. I don't know if a temp spike could actually halt development without killing the embyo and causing the egg to go bad.

Despite the spike to 90, if you're incubating at the lower end of the temperature range (high 70s/low 80s), this will extend the incubation time.

Keep us posted!