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Dimpling and sweating at due date

princess

princess

Cornaholic
As you all know I've been talking non stop about my clutch of 10 butter x amel het caramel eggs due around the 6-10th of July.

Well here we are at the end of the incubating road and I have 7/10 that are dented to a lesser or greater degree which I take as a good sign that business is progressing nicely.

One egg however is showing some good dimpleing but is also sweaty on the uppermost part of the egg. I did a search and couldn't find anything terribly specific to this, -Plenty of issues with sweating earlier on in the process but not at this last moment except for in Sashenna's horror story thread from last year where pretty much the whole breeding season was lost...I'm hoping my situation is a little different to hers.

Have any of you experienced an otherwise perfect looking egg with the 'last minute dimples' starting to sweat?
 
I've experienced exactly what you're describing with a couple eggs from different clutches. None of them ever pipped. :cry:
I hope your experience is different! :shrugs:
 
Urgh, thanks for the answer all the same Zach, even though it means it's probably bad news for that egg. The annoying part is that it's one of the few eggs in that clutch that has looked good from the beginning, all the way up to this point. I have a handfull in this clutch that have looked odd/wrong all along but have grown nicely and look like they might hatch normally and then this one perfect one looks like it might go bad...Oh well, that's life. :cry:
 
Last year .... right before I learned JUST how disastrous my breeding season would be, I had two clutches that both had a single egg in each clutch that suddenly started to sweat.... BOTH were dead in egg.... (I had plenty of those).... My thoughts on the subject are:

When the little snakey knows it's time to get OUT of the egg, it starts searching for the exit. (and continues searching for the exit all it's life, which makes snakes great escape artists). In the process, of course, the little egg tooth MAKES the exit, and the snake hatches.

When the little snakey has a problem hatching... egg tooth or snake itself not strong enough to do more than scratch at the surface, whatever inner barrier there is to the egg is breached, and the baby dies because it cannot get out. The sweating is because the barrier is breached some some of the moisture on the inside starts to seep out. The egg is no longer an egg, because it's integrity has been compromised.

Of course I had a LOT of dead in egg babies last year, but the first two stand in my memory because they were the first. And one of them came from a clutch of perfect kingsnake eggs.

I'm sorry to hear about your possible loss. My thoughts above are just that, no scientific fact to them, so hopefully I'm wrong and your egg is just getting ready to hatch. Good luck!
 
3 of mine dimple just one week before to hatch. At first I tought it was because they were due, because I read in the cornsnake manual that it can occur sometimes before they hatch. So i did exactly what was written, I misted them and add just a bit more moisture to make sure it was not a lack of humidity. But I tought it was impossible because I've kept the same humidity level during the two months of incubation and there was no problems!! After two days I saw no improvement, and one was getting worst. At this point, one of my female was double clutching, and I had to make new vermiculite for her new eggs. I had the idea to change completly the old vermiculite from my dimple eggs, and burrow them just a little more into it... i also add a piece of wet paper towel on the top of the container. The day after, all my dimple eggs were round again and good looking!!! So maybe.... because they absorb fluid that is into the egg few days before to hatch, maybe the eggs need more humidity... I don't know, but that's my experience, hope it can help. :)
 
Thanks for that thought Corn234 but I think my humidity is pretty much perfect! There's another clutch in the incubator at about 4 weeks that look perfect and I would expect the prehatch-dimples to be occurring at this time so I'm not worried about the humidity being too low.

Sasheena(or anyone else), would you suggest I should try to cut open the egg to see if I have a hatchling in there that has ruptured it's membrane but can't cut the shell for some reason?

I really want a good yeild from this clutch especially, seeings only ½ the babies are mine and only ½ are expected to be butters.....
 
If none of the eggs have hatched, I wouldn't cut it.

My "hypothesis" that I stated above would include the ugly thought that if it's sweating, it's dead. So if I'm WRONG, you don't want to mess with it... if I'm right.... nothing you do now will help... so just wait until some of the others have hatched.

If I was incubating at 80* or higher and 80 days went by and this happened, I might open up the sweaty egg (or a really ugly nasty looking one) to see what is going on. But it's usually disheartening in the long run. BAsically the clutch will provide you with exactly what it is destined to give you... if that's beautiful viable babies, then you will have beautiful viable babies. Being anxious to see what's going on inside the egg will either lead to sad knowledge of an egg gone wrong, or worse, could lead to opening up something that needed that extra time in order to be able to hatch out well.
 
POST SCRIPT

The egg in question has given me a perfect looking little amel.

After much delliberation and a fair bit of reading more on the matter, I decided to slit the shell, as all I could find was basically telling me the egg was done for. I cut the shell and saw a hatchling inside that wasn't moving (when I touched it with a sterile probe) and I thought, 'Oh well, nothing I could have done anyway'. Later that day I thought I noticed that the hatchlings position in the shell seemed different but I wasn't 100% sure so I made a good mental note and checked again later and saw that not only had the baby rotated but it was 'bubbling' out of the window I'd cut!

I want you all to know I only took this step because I thought the egg was lost and from Sasheena's hypothesis, I may be able to save it if it hadn't drowned yet. Perhaps the egg was good after all and would have hatched by itself, but perhaps it was in distress and cutting the window let the little snakelet make its way out into the world...we'll never know.

All I can say is there's a happy ending to this story and I wanted to share my results so that perhaps if someone else is in the same situation they might have a little more information to go on than I was able to find. Of course if it had been a bad result, we wouldn't have known if my actions had killed the hatchling or if it was dead in the first place but this is what happened.....

So another nice little amel has come into the world!
 
I'm glad to hear that you got a beautiful live baby out of that egg! My next clutch of eggs has started to hatch, and first thing I noticed is one egg with a HUGE slit, and another egg starting to sweat. URGH. The temptation to open it up is huge. But I'm going to let it go until tomorrow morning. Then I will give it a nip with my "egg scissors" just before the whole family goes on vacation. That will give it 36 or more hours to determine if it feels like hatching, without the slightest bit of interference from me. This way I can act, and not act.
 
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