by Matthew Cobb
A couple of weeks back, a chicken in Bijie, a small village in southwest China, laid a massive double-yolk egg which contained ANOTHER EGG. In fact, the chicken (name unknown, owner 87 year-old Granny Yang) has laid a few of these monsters. EGGstraordinary Don’t believe me? Here’s THE PROOF:
And if that wasn’t enough EGGcitement for you, here’s a genuine photo taken on a field course I ran in the foothills of the French Alps.
My colleague Henry McGhie and I published this in New Scientist in 2006, with this question:
Some of our students noticed a seemingly intact duck egg found in a small pond contained something moving; when we broke the shell by poking it with a finger, we found three live minnows (Phoxinus phoxinus – see picture). As 21st century scientists rather than 17th century antiquarians, we think it is somewhat unlikely that this represents a hitherto unknown mode of fish reproduction.
I emphasise that this has not been photoshopped, it is not a fake. But what is the EGGSplanation?
The image subsequently went round the world, including to China, where we were featured in a children’s science magazine called Young Copernicus (the editor apologised to me as the circulation was ‘only’ 380,000…). I subsequently got a letter from a Chinese man saying he had seen one of these eggs 50 years ago…
There’s more types of fakery than just Photoshop….
b&
Indeed. Methinks the yolk is on us.
Yeah, how hard would it be to put a couple of minnows into a cracked egg? You don’t even need photoshop for that.
Even if the egg isn’t cracked…I’ll bet that a competent and deviously-minded ichthyologist could figure out a way to incubate fish fry in a duck’s egg. It’s just a variation on the “ship-in-a-bottle” theme.
And one can even imagine similar scenarios happening without human intervention…say, if the egg fell into the water, just slightly chipped enough to let fish fry eat their way in the rest of the way, and the fry growing off the egg without ever bothering to leave the sheltered, nutrient-rich environment.
Cheers,
b&
a) There are three; b) I’d like to see you try – especially without cracking the egg! Photos please!
This was NOT a student (or staff) prank. However, Ben below has it right I think. And NB the weasel word ‘seemingly’ in “a seemingly intact duck egg”.
By ‘Ben has it right’ I mean I agree with Ben’s second paragraph – this is NOT a human manipulation, it is a natural (but extremely unlikely) event.
Don’t know that I’d completely rule out the possibility of human trickery…Randi has made me a wee bit too cynical for that.
But it seems that it should be relatively straightforward to experimentally investigate. Leave some slightly chipped eggs in water in the presence of just-spawned fish in conditions similar to the lake where the egg was discovered, and see what happens. You might never know if the particular incident in question is honest, but it should be straightforward to figure out if the general class of phenomenon is plausible.
And…one can also easily enough, and equally cynically enough, imagine cheesy commercial applications, with everything from pet novelties to haute (Asian?) cuisine….
Cheers,
b&
Don’t know about the fish in the duck egg – possibly the egg is slightly porous and so the fish sperm/eggs can actually penetrate it?
The monster Chinese eggs are clearly the embryonic stage of the turducken.
Yes, turducken babies. Rarely seen in their natural habitat.
Duck eggs are notoriously more porous than chicken eggs. So they can pick up (human-) infectious bacteria relatively easily.
Whether that extends as far as whole fish fry … is another question.
Or (this is going to make the women wince as much as the idea of passing that monster egg makes me wince!) … if the duck is swimming or even laying it’s egg in the vicinity of spawning fish – the groups that use external fertilisation of eggs scattered on the stream or lake bed – I can just about envisage getting eggs and sperm into the cloaca in sufficient quantity that internal fertilisation of the fish eggs inside the ducks oviduct doesn’t seem a priori. It’s still pretty implausible though ; I’m sure that there are barriers, both physical (mucous), chemical, and immunological.
Regarding the minnows, does anybody know what species they are?
The striations remind me of perch.
It says in the post: Phoxinus phoxinus
Not even Charles Fort appears to have picked up on that one.
Yes in fact the Fortean Times featured the egg picture…
Fort was no fan of the Fortean cult which grew up in his wake.
So, the chicken must have an obstruction in the area where the shell is formed around the yolk and albumin. This causes formed eggs to become enveloped by subsequent yolks and then finally a shell is formed around the entire thing and deposited, right?
The following video explains the science behind the egg within the egg.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YrBTg8YANYE#!
“When I was a kid on the farm,” as the saying goes, we had perhaps fifty laying hens. Double yoked eggs were not uncommon but commercial egg producers “candle” the eggs so that double yokes are usually removed from the retail end of the business. We did, however, have occasional double shelled eggs but the interior egg was always much smaller than an ordinary egg. I have enough familiarity with hen anatomy to know that minnows have no chance of getting into an egg. Besides the strong shell there is an essentially impermeable membrane lining (not to mention the obstacles of getting through the rest of the hen’s internal anatomy. Only small quantities of air necessary for the metabolism of the growing chick can pass through this membrane. Minnows in an unbroken egg? I would welcome a reasonable explanation.
I’m with Ben on this… some kind of fakery in the minnow example.
How does the chicken feel when its laying an egg like that? Does it hurt the hen?
They probably don’t often talk about such an embarrassing subject.
Must be like shitting a basketball.
At least now I know which came first, the chicken or the egg. It’s eggs all the way down.
My eyes water. But they water at the sight of a normal chicken’s egg too, when scaled for body size.
I think I’d rather have a Kinder egg surprise…
As Michael above said, double yolks are fairly common, as for a second inner egg, not as much. And as for the size of that egg, I feel rather sorry for that chicken.
EGGSactly!
Oh, the agony and EGGstacy…
It was hard not to notice the derelict, run-down living quarters of that elderly woman. I thought the Chinese honored and cared for their elders?
In her village perhaps that’s all the honor and care they can manage.
And count me among the people who think the fish in the egg is a fake. I’ve bred a few different types of cyprinids and there’s no way they could survive inside of an egg. The fish in the picture are near adult size and I would point out that most temperate water cyprinids need a lot of oxygen. It just isn’t going to happen.
+ 1
I’m agreeing with the ‘fake’ idea. They would have to grow, develop and live in that tiny space. As bacopa said, they appear to be of adult size.
Not only would they have surely run of out of available nourishment quite quickly, even as fry… And they would have excreting waste all of the time that they were growing, assuming they had available oxygen. They would surely have died of nitrate poisoning or stress, within a short period. I cannot see how they would have grown that large. Anyone who has ever ‘kept’ tropical fish in an aquarium, would know that a failure to remove waste products quickly pollutes the water.
That, or it’s April 1 already on here!
There’s something fishy going on with that duck egg. For one thing, where’s the albumin or the yolk? If the fish consumed this, then what is the liquid they are swimming in, it looks like water. From some basic internetting I’ve found that ducks lay their eggs in nests so an egg in a pond sounds out of place. Assuming no blatant fakery, if the egg had a small chip in the “seemingly intact” outer shell which allowed the albumin to seep out and pond water to seep in, would the yolk be an attractive meal for baby minnows? Or for a minnow egg to somehow have gotten inside? I guess this demands the question of which came first, the minnow or the egg?
I’d like them to do a DNA analysis on the purported duck egg. Is there any way fertilized fish eggs could get in a duck’s reproductive track? Doesn’t the male duck of some species have a weird corkscrew penis? If fish egg and sperm managed to get inside a duck cloaca, could a shell form around them with enough water so support the embryonic fish?
Hmmm. hat you’ve said makes me want to modify my previous comment about it being eggs all the way down.
Q: Which came first the duck or the egg?
A: The drake.
One way or the other it’s downright fishy.
A seemingly intact duck egg. I suspect that someone was beta testing a new type of duck tape.
sub
I have seen eggs exactly like that – not often but around. I always figured there was some kind of interruption when the shell was being formed . . .