> As a follow up to my last post re mushy eggs: once the eggs arrive in your
> posession the game is not over. Care must be taken in the days prior to hatching
> or the eggs can/will still fail. If the eggs have already been damaged before
> getting to you then they may be already lost. I have had perfectly good looking
> eggs go mushy despite my TLC. You can't tell by looking at them with the naked
> eye. Perhaps a microscope would reveal something.
You may find that dying eggs with trypan blue would help on this. Dead
ones would be blue and live ones still clear. It is a common technique in
cell biology for determining the percentage of viable cells in a
population. Off hand I do not remember whether or not it is toxic to
cells and you would probably only want to use it on a test set of mops to
determine what peramiters affected viablity.
Peter Hughes