The night before Rachel and I went to the elementary school, we brought the crayfish for the lesson back to the house. One aggressive crayfish had a tub to himself, because he didn't play well with the others. The rest were in a high-sided mop bucket.
I left them in the living room, and took the lid off of the lone crayfish's tub. I'd only put the lid on to keep the crayfish from slopping out into my car, and figured he needed air for the night. I may or may not have done this a few hours after hearing Rachel's childhood story of crayfish escapees in their car. I've got no real excuse other than blatant absentmindedness.
The next morning, as we got ready to load up, we decided to check on them. You know when you just KNOW something has happened, before you have any proof? Well, this didn't really take any ESP skills but, sure enough, the lone crayfish escaped the tub in the night and was loose in the house. Our handy information cards told us they can only live for 10 minutes out of water, so we did a quick look, found no escapee, then hoped we'd have a half a day before he started stinking.
2 hours later, after teaching, the search began in earnest. After staring behind the dishwasher, I was hopeless that we would ever find this critter. Who new there were so many dark hideyholes? While mentally preparing to break the bad news to the housemates, I heard a scratching sound. Finally, a sad, slow, dust-covered crayfish shuffled out from behind the recycling. Dust on his antennae, dust on his pinchers. He almost looked sheepish.
We named him Bandit.
2 comments:
what were you doing with the little buggers?
Theorectically? To teach 8-year olds how to make observations and how careful observations answer many of the questions we ask about the world around us.
In reality, we were submitting the poor buggers to a few hours of semi-restrained torture at the hands of 3rd-graders. There were rules of course. No ripping the legs/pinchers off, if you get pinched, you probably deserved it. Regardless, they were probably scared much of the time.....
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