Triop Wars

J-girl took Little J to the Living Planet Aquarium a couple of weeks ago, and together they decided that the time was ripe to raise triops again. J-girl took advantage of me being at work to commandeer the small fishbowl on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, the one that we use to hold the brushes we use for scrubbing dishes. I came home to find the bowl full of water and the brushes lying forlornly on the counter. A day or two later, the triops began hatching. At first there was a lot of interest in the triops. Little J was excited to see which ones would get eaten and which would survive. She fed them regularly and even cleaned the water once. She and J-girl would count them several times a day to see if any had been cannibalized. However, they soon became desensitized to the violence and gradually stopped watching them. Yesterday, as I was washing my hands at the kitchen sink, I noticed that the last one was feeding on the carcass of the next to last one. All that was left of loser was its head. The winner seemed to be eating its brain stem. Yuck!

I mentioned it to Little J, thinking that this was the supreme example of violence that she had been craving ever since she bought the box of triop eggs. She was doing something at the computer and couldn’t be bothered to look. No one else wanted to look, either. It wasn’t because they were grossed out like me; it was because it just wasn’t sensational enough for them to quit what they were doing and walk 20 feet to the windowsill.

That’s the moment I realized that doing science, especially raising triops, was just one more way that Satan is undermining the moral fabric of society. If I had really been paying attention, I would have recognized this sooner. After all, triops have feelers like horns and a long, evil-looking tail. They get more and more red markings as they grow. It’s not much of a leap from there to conclude that they must be the devil’s angels.

We still have half of the eggs left. I don’t think that anyone intends to start the process over again, at least not for a while. Death and carnage is no longer exciting enough to clean out the fishbowl. I’ll wait another week or so, and then I’ll quietly take the bowl back over. Everyone will be so glad they didn’t have to clean up the mess, and I will be glad to get Satan out of my house.