One thing after another [status, work]

[rebeccmeister]

Yesterday at the very end of a quite full day, as I was finishing up a rewrite of the first Animal Physiology exam, a colleague knocked on my door to ask for help with a surprise shipment of sea creatures. I'd been maintaining our large flow-through saltwater tank with the idea that even if I didn't move the horseshoe crabs over into it, it would still be useful to have it ready to go as a backup and for the couple-week period when students in General Biology are learning about marine invertebrates.

And really, what's more fun, writing an exam, or rehousing the marine invertebrates?

This batch unfortunately arrived a month too early, so they may not all survive until it's time for students to work with them. So we'd better enjoy them now, while we can. Another batch is apparently supposed to arrive on time.

It's hard to take photos through running water, but here are a sea pansy (purple, upper left), urchin, and red-footed sea slugs:



This is some sort of wee ghost crab:



We got a decorator crab with this batch, too! So cute!


As I watched, the ghost crab decided to go and antagonize the decorator crab:


Crabs be crabbin'. So I put the decorator crab into its own separate little container.

One of the tubs, overall:


The tube delivers water into the tub, and the overflow drips out into the main basin of the flow-through tank. This is a pretty good setup for ensuring the water stays well-oxygenated.

When I came back in this morning, the power to the flow-through pump was out, and I also realized it's maybe not a good idea to have the bivalves in with the predatory whelks, so I moved the tiny clams over to a separate tub.

Hermit crab on top of some sort of giant barnacle:


If you look closely, you might notice that this hermit crab's shell has a wee anemone on it. So cute!

Sponges, snails, and an urchin, oh my! And yes, another hermit crab, if you look closely again.


I got home pretty late from the surprise animal rehousing, so in turn I once again failed to get up for rowing practice, sigh. This has just been a rough week.

Today it would be way more fun to spend the day trying to draw these critters, instead of what I should be doing, which is using this precious time to work on manuscript-writing.

But manuscript-writing it is. Eyes on the prize, or something.

Comments

[yarnandglue]

How cool! I love the little crabs!

[cmcmck]

I love exploring rock pools and this reminds me! :o)

[rebeccmeister]

Yes! There are so many delightful creatures to encounter!

[twoeleven]

What are y'all going to teach with the great variety of critters?

[rebeccmeister]

I never teach the labs that work with these critters, but I believe the idea is to provide examples of different taxa to make the taxa more relatable for students who have never seen these things before.

[twoeleven]

That makes sense. I wouldn't have thought college students needed that, but perhaps I overestimate people's experiences.

Ironically, last night I was working on details for a cyberpunk dystopia¹ and I decided it needed a "zoo" where all the animals where holograms, the real things being extinct.

1: For a software toy called Dystopika, a sort of SimCity for people who lik cyberpunk.

[rebeccmeister]

When I was a grad student teaching introductory Biology labs, I was always kind of amazed when I would bring students out to our nearby "mountain" and ask them what type of plant we were looking at, and no one could volunteer an answer. The plant I would point out was a creosote bush, and they are EVERYWHERE in the low desert.

And since we are an inland institution here in Upstate New York, not everyone has a chance to see tidepool critters. Plus, many of the marine invertebrates in this collection come from further-away regions, and most aquariums wouldn't allow the general public to touch them directly (for good reason!!).

The colleague who spearheads these labs says she's always amused by how one fraction of the students gravitates towards the bins and is fascinated, while another fraction doesn't want to touch or interact with anything - often the latter fraction is usually made up of students who say they're interested in studying medicine, which pains me greatly.

It all gets to be far more fun in my labs, where I make the students handle the animals directly and poke them and whatnot. There are often specific cases where I'll tell a student they should leave the handling up to their labmates, because they are so nervous and uncomfortable that they put both themselves and the animal at risk.

[twoeleven]

Oh, yeah. I'm doubtless more used to sea critters than most, since I used to keep freshwater fish until I went to college. But even in those primitive days, sometimes marine animals were offered for sale in pet stores.

I also had access to a zoo by subway, which doubtless helped too.

[rebeccmeister]

I think there are some major generational differences in our country with regards to hobbies like birdwatching, fishkeeping, and poking critters with sticks in the woods. This is tied to the shift away from unstructured time and towards overscheduling of extracurricular activities. Perhaps also tied to increases in depression and anxiety among younger people?

[twoeleven]

I'm sure overscheduling doesn't help. Neither does people spending all their time staring at their phone, nor does over-protective parents who won't let their kids out of their sight.¹ That all probably doesn't do much for kids' anxiety/depression.

1: The real irony of that is that, at least for parents of my age, is that our generation ran loose, and our parents had no idea where we were. And yet we survived.

[rebeccmeister]

Nowadays, if parents don't know where their children are, the parents risk getting arrested for child neglect!

[twoeleven]

I think that somewhere, some time ago, the US was collectively dropped on its head.

[twoeleven]

Dïe Überblønde says that birdwatching is doing well recently, helped in part by iNaturalist.