When genetics teaching goes very, very bad » « It’s an obituary

Nobody here but us chickens

I’m still waiting for my black widow egg sacs to hatch out, and I’m getting a little concerned. My lab is still a frigid cold victim of bad environmental controls in my building — 17°C (62°F) — and although I’ve got the little guys packed up in incubators, I also have to worry about very low humidity, under 30%. I’ve been shopping for incubators with both thermal and humidity control, but it’s a terrible mistake to try looking in scientific supply catalogs. $1500? For a little 0.2L box? That’s not going to do.

So I resorted to Amazon, and searched for egg hatching stuff. Here we go — there’s a mass market demand for incubators for chicken eggs, so that’s what I got.

There we go, Egg Incubator, Intelligent Incubator for Chicken Eggs with Automatic Humidity Control and Egg Turning, Temperature control, 15 Eggs Incubator for Hatching Eggs&Quail egg with Egg Candler. $40. I just calibrated it, and am waiting for it to stabilize at 30°C and 75% humidity. I disabled the egg turning, and don’t have much use for an egg candler. I think they need to adjust their ad copy to mention Spider Eggs.

I’m still keeping my eyes open for a used scientific-grade incubator, but this will do. I also think the physical plant people need to get on the ball and get the environmental controls properly balanced — my lab is a refrigerator all summer long, while some of the offices are saunas, I hear. I complain every year, but nothing is ever done.

When genetics teaching goes very, very bad » « It’s an obituary

Comments

  2. Rich Woods says

    Presumably the egg candler is simply a candle and can be repurposed around the house as a useful non-egg-illuminating candle.

  5. birgerjohansson says

    Try hatching an ostrich. They are interesting, they are the only birds to peoduce urine, among other things.

  6. birgerjohansson says

    And if you apply a time-reversal projector on a chicken egg – like they did in Red Dwarf – you can get a big, hungry theropod!

  7. Snidely W says

    Time to find the building’s environmental controls and change that thermostat yourself.
    It might be that nobody else will notice.

  10. says

    Don’t tell Amazon. They’ll disable the egg turner and candler and rebadge it as a laboratory incubator at 10 times the price.