Cutting fire skink eggs?

[hungba]

I have a pair of fire skinks which unexpectedly bred. There were 6 eggs. 2 went bad the first week of incubation. The remaining 4, 3 have hatched, and babies are eating. It has been 3 days since the first one hatched, 2 since the third one.

The fourth egg still hasn't hatched. It is sweating little like the other three did. It has been 3 days and I am worried that the baby can not pip.

I am experienced with snakes and if these were python eggs I would have cut the last egg already, but not sure about skink eggs. Should I be cutting them or not?

The objective is the save the baby if it needs saving, and if skink eggs should/can be cut to do so. This is not about whether "nature" should weed out the weak babies if they didn't hatch themselves, that is a separate discussion.

Thank you.

[MarkS]

I've found that as a rule the smaller the egg, the less likely it is to survive cutting. I'm not sure why, but I believe that with ball pythons the eggs are fairly large and so are the hatchlings so cutting into a vein and losing a few drops of blood is no big deal, however cutting into a smaller egg with a smaller hatchlings, losing a few drops of blood can be a pretty big deal. I'm not sure that's the reason, but in my experience cutting smaller eggs the hatchlings are less likely to survive.

BTW, hatchling fire skinks would be pretty cool to see, do you have any pictures yet?