Out of curiosity sake, I candled the eggs to see if they survived being in the fridge overnight. Egg#1 is not fertile. But egg number two survived!! It's so freaky!!



What should I do?

Btw, those are not my hands! They are my sisters lol

I just checked again and there's a heartbeat

Someone please make me feel better about freezing the egg. I didn't do it. Am I going to be considered a murderer?

Only you can decide what to do with the egg.

I believe it would be wrong for anyone to consider you a murderer if you are just not up to raising another chick right now.

Marshmallow has been mating with her father so it's entirely possible that this is an incest baby. Letting incest babies be born is asking for trouble - it doesn't always turn out badly but the risks are high. I've swapped real eggs for fakes with Teela and Squeebis a number of times and didn't feel any guilt about it. Those eggs were probably fertile, but they're brother and sister so it was the responsible thing to do.

Thank you both. I froze the egg for 4 min. and noticed that the heart stopped. I then left it in the fridge and took it out and noticed that some veins vanished.

I feel terrible. I would never let it hatch. I just needed some reassurance.

What will the worst happen if the egg hatches? My mom says that nothing will happen. She said that only applys for humans.

It most certainly does not. Any animal can become genetically weaker due to incest breeding. I never bred before, nor have I seen an incest baby, but I know most of the time, the baby ends up suffering due to abnormalities, physically or genetically.

Not only are they related...they are both Lutino which makes everything 2 as worse!

I didn't even think of that. You're right. Quite possibly the most genetically weak of the cockatiel mutations and with added abnormalities from incest, that baby most likely would not have had a good chance.

Inbreeding and incest can cause problems in any species. Only humans have a morality issue with it, but the laws of genetics apply to everything. With every complex organism that lives there's a high probability that it carries a few bad genes, which won't cause problems unless the individual's mate has the same bad gene and they pair up in the offspring so that the unhealthy trait gets expressed. Family members have a lot of the same genes so there's a high risk that their bad genes will get paired together and cause health issues in the offspring.

Susanne (srtiels) can tell you some good stories about the problems she's seen with inbreeding, not from doing it herself but from seeing others do it. A lot of show bird family lines are spectacularly good looking but have major health problems and die young because of the inbreeding practices used to develop those good looks. Even on TC I've seen members ask why their eggs don't hatch or why their babies die, and when you ask if the parents are closely related the answer is "yes, they're brother and sister". Apparently a lot of people haven't gotten the word that inbreeding is risky.

Maybe slightly out of topic (it's about humans), but the effects of inbreeding are horrendous and history is full of examples. There was a time when most kings were drooling morons full of genetic diseases, and that was due to the constant inbreeding practiced to keep the power within the same bunch of families. All the European royal families were related, so the situation went from bad to worse.