(no subject)

[vyvyanx]

I just found a very unusual egg, from a box of Sainsbury's free range. It appeared to be two eggs fused together: there was an obvious join line, and the resultant egg was substantially longer and less egg-shaped than normal. Unsurprisingly, it was a double-yolker. Has anyone else ever come across such an egg?

Comments

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I have no joke - I just like saying MUTANT CHICKEN!

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Nope, and we kept chickens (well bantems) for aaaages; several double yolkers tho

[antinomy.livejournal.com]

Based on second year avian anatomy sessions on How Chickens Work, I can see pretty much how such a thing would happen. You'd need two eggs entering the shell-creating bit of the chicken's reproductive tract at the same time, having been seperate earlier - as distinct from a normal double yolker where two yolks would have to enter the white-laying-down bit together. I guess it's kind of akin to siamese twins, or something, and probably about as rare... I take it there was no shell inside the egg in the joining zone?

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

No, there was no shell inside. The yolks seemed to have been inhabiting different ends of the egg when I broke it open, and only one of them (the one in the slightly larger section of mutant egg!) was surrounded by the thicker sort of white that normally surrounds yolks - the other was just floating free in the thinner stuff.

Thanks for your explanation of how this came about - I was very surprised by finding this egg! Perhaps I should have kept it, if it was so rare?

[antinomy.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a reasonable presentation for the way it would have happened - the second yolk would just have 'piggy-backed' down the system. By the way, congratulations for noticing there are two kinds of white, most people are completely oblivious to the fact.

And there'd probably have been no point in keeping it - the shell, blown, might have been a minor curiosity, but there's no good way of preserving raw eggs that I know of :)

[rowan-leigh.livejournal.com]

I found a double-veined leaf on my parent's camellia bush when I was about 8, and something possessed me to chop it up into little bits. Which is downright odd considering that I was interested in pressing flowers at the time and could have preserved it that way. Hey-ho.