Not only did we not kill these creatures the first day, we've actually kept them alive (well, most of them) for more than two weeks. Considering that triops have a life expectancy of 20-90 days, I'm ready to declare the experiment a success.
We originally found that four had hatched. They were promptly named Rosalind, Skye, Jane and Batty, after The Penderwicks. After a day or two, we discovered there were actually five little critters motoring around the small tank. We named the fifth one Jeffrey (also from the Penderwicks.) Jeffrey soon disappeared, though, so we said he'd gone off to school at Pencey Military Academy. We were left with our four girls, and watched them grow at amazing speed. Unfortunately, one day we found we had only three Triop-enderwicks left. Ouch. We couldn't bring ourselves to consider all the possibilities (the least disgusting of which was that Mr. Putter the cat had helped himself) so we simply redubbed one of them Batty-Jane, so as to avoid the depressing turn the conversation would have taken had we acknowledged that one of our pets had died and been (yuck) eaten by her sisters.
I may not be the best science teacher, but I'm excellent in the "sensitive to feelings" department.
Betsy summed up the experience this way:
"There's only one problem with these triops."
"What's that?"
"They're CREEPY!"
1 comment:
Raising guppies provokes the same sorts of questions. My mother let us attempt it when I was about 12 or so. In that case the adults eat the babies, so you have to rescue the babies as soon as they're born. It's a wonder that the species ever survived at all. I guess the same thing is true of triops.
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