An egg inside an egg. Sounds tasty doesn’t? When one couple gathered some eggs from their hen, they came across a very large egg. It turned out that the egg was large for a good reason…it had another egg inside it. The video below shows the actual footage of what happens when the large egg is cracked open. In addition to a yoke and a white that you would normally see when you crack an egg, you see an entirely separate egg complete and still in its shell.
The egg owner is intrigued and goes on to opening the extra egg to see what’s inside it. It turns out this is a normal egg with the yolk and white intact.
Apparently, there is a name for such a phenomenon and an egg inside an egg is known as a counter-peristalsis contraction, which means that the egg that had already gone through the hen’s oviduct gets sucked back up before it has a chance to finish developing, thus allowing another egg to develop around it.“Sometimes, if you have another ovulation before the first egg is laid, you have a ‘counter-peristalsis contraction,’ which means the oviduct will contract upward, and the first egg will be moved back up,” Poultry Science editor Gregory Bedecarats said. “When you see a tiny egg incorporated in a larger one, it means the egg was still present in the shell gland and got sucked back up the oviduct to where the other egg was having its white deposited.”
“I have seen that happen once before when my aunt had chickens. Also, cut a bell pepper open once and there was another tiny, fully formed, bell pepper inside it.”
When the family cracks open the egg it looks a bit like one of those Russian Nesting Dolls.
One commenter had a decent explanation for the rare incident…
“Sometimes when the hen is laying an egg it doesn’t have the sperm to make a baby chicken so very rarely the egg goes back the way it came (instead of laying the first egg it goes back up the chicken’s body) and another eggshell surrounds the first egg.. therefore when the second egg lays it’s much bigger and has another egg inside! 1 question. How did you get the egg? I don’t think they would sell it in a store.”
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