Eating eggs starts to feel pretty weird when you think about them too much. Produced as the hens' released eggs failed to meet any sperm before making an exit, they’re usually enthusiastically pecked back up by their maker as it’s not energetically cheap cooking one up. Keepers of chickens who want to harvest the unfertilized eggs sometimes put in decoy eggs that are solid, in an attempt to train the birds out of immediately gorging on their coop mates' creations.
Being a natural process that happens within animals, egg-making is prone to some pretty weird improvisations. “Jelly eggs” with soft shells, or sometimes eggs with no shells at all, can pop out when the hen’s diet is low in calcium. Beyond being a bit freaky, it doesn’t impact the egg’s quality as a snack but if there’s a developing embryo inside things can get messy.
Double yolkers are another popular egg-based-oddity, reported to occur in roughly one in every 1,000 chicken eggs. While the press has covered multiple double yolker events with stats around the one in a trillion mark, they’re likely to come in clusters so this isn’t entirely true.
A recent video on TikTok revealed to a roaring ovation yet another quirk that can happen with chicken eggs, as one user recorded an egg reveal video of a MASSIVE egg squeezed out by their hen (spare a thought for the cloaca, please). The egg weighed 150 grams (0.3 pounds) and was around 8 centimeters (3 inches) tall. That’s roughly three times heavier than your average chicken egg.
Remarkably, when the TikTokers crack the egg open there is A SECOND EGG inside. Kinder Surprise, indeed. While pretty wacky and admittedly rare, this kind of eggception is not unheard of, and the explanation as to how it happens will have you thinking of that cloaca once more.
Our female hen cooked up egg one and went to push that baby out, only for a counter-peristalsis contraction to suck it back up again. This full-formed egg was then pushed into the gooey mass of a developing one, which managed to encase it. As the TikTok video shows, the outer egg was still able to do a pretty good job in creating a nutritious yolk and albumin. “But what of the SECOND egg?!” I hear you cry.
It stands to reason that the inside egg would be pretty standard (if not a bit old) considering it was ready to bust out of that hen while egg number two was still developing. Whether or not it’s wise to eat these eggs we’ve not the legal team to advise, but you could always turn the eggstravagant goo (I’m sorry, I had to) into some conditioner like the family in this video.
