It involves an Animal Involved in Research (the Salmon in Question and its Remarkable Journey) and many people find that sort of thing upsetting and may try to kill you for it. I am happy to tell you in private.
Basically, some salmon-related Science was going to happen. I was asked if I wanted to observe this Science, which promised to be interesting, and obviously said yes. The Science did not go as planned. A series of logical decisions were made, each one building sensibly on the last, but the final situation suddenly seemed very illogical.
And then one finds oneself explaining this to an Authority, who is sarcastic and judgmental. The Salmon is sarcastic and judgmental also.
To be fair, important knowledge for the benefit of salmonkind has been discovered as a consequence.
Also some unimportant knowledge.
Years later, we laugh about it.
Ok I feel like I should add that the Transported Salmon did not suffer in the story. Well, it had to suffer the company of fools.
However! I have thought of an aspect of Salmon Story that is appropriate to share in public because
A) it’s so utterly Pure that even an animal rights terrorist couldn’t argue, and
B) none of it was my problem, so no Anxiety attaches.
Okay so you need a little background Science to appreciate this story. You need to know that salmon hatch in freshwater rivers and travel down to the sea, to live their adult lives in the ocean. Then they return to the same river where they hatched, to lay their own eggs and die of exhaustion. (This is oversimplified but you get the idea.) you’ve probably seen them on nature documentaries, flinging themselves up waterfalls, leaping from rock to rock, then finally reaching the top and getting eaten by a bear.
because Salmon are an important (tasty) commercial species, as well as being key parts of food webs, and also beautiful wild animals, we want them to continue doing this.
Damming rivers to generate electric power creates a rather big barrier to salmon laying their eggs. If you have seen a dam on a big river then you may have seen a fish ladder running up it. This looks like a rather brutal concrete staircase with water coming down it. The idea is that the fish can cross the dam by flinging themselves up the fish ladder, the way they climb waterfalls. Fish ladders are also useful where human activity has added other obstacles – diverted rivers, added water wheels or dead ends, steepened waterfalls, added flood barriers, drained estuaries, etc. They take different forms, including elevators that FLING the fish up to the next level, but the staircase design is the easiest to build. Ok now you’re all caught up
This part of the salmon story takes place in an indoor fishery, where one might go to obtain a young salmon. The fishery had many giant tubs, some of which had currents, so the fish swam around them in circles, really believing they were going somewhere. Anyway, we were concluding other business, and so I chatted to a local researcher, who seemed to like the attention.
“Would you like to see my new fish ladder design,” said the local scientist.
“Yes,” I said immediately.
It was a very nice prototype. Only a few steps of a full staircase but very attractive. He sold it to me – it was cheaper, more natural, less damaging, less intrusive. It was a very promising design of fish ladder. It was, the local scientist said, Fish Friendly. (That’s why this story is so Unproblematic, despite having Lab Animals in it – obviously you need to test a new fish ladder with actual fish.)
“Want to see a fish climb it?”
“Hell yes,” I said.
The scientist produced a fat young demonstration salmon from a nearby tank. We discussed the limitations of the demonstration. This was a baby salmon, not a tough old breeder; the conditions weren’t wild; the salmon had little motivation to climb the ladder. But, the scientist promised, the salmon was an expert and experienced demonstrator and had been carefully trained with snacks, which is why it was so fat.
He placed the fat young fish in the pool and stood back proudly and CHAOS!!! BROKE!!! THE FUCK OUT!
The man reeled back BLEEDING FROM THE FACE, there was a BANG, and the fish had VANISHED, it was just GONE,
Lights were reeling everywhere, everyone was stunned,
After determining that the guy was only stunned and bleeding because his glasses had been PUNCHED INTO HIS NOSE the question was WHERE IS THE FISH???? The question of “what the fuck had just happened” was a tertiary concern. THE FISH HAD VANISHED
Biologists love animals, so it was a case of everyone, including a stumbling stunned bleeding man, casting about wildly for the missing fish. Nightmare visions danced in our heads of this beautiful brave fish, this fat and beloved expert baby, suffocating in a dark dirty corner of the floor, or having perished in whatever the fuck just happened… we worked out that the fish had jumped up a step, then turned and used the fish ladder to push off in the other direction, and punched the guy in the face, so we followed that proposed trajectory.
Ok so we couldn’t find the fish, and then we all sort of looked up at the lights, and we all simultaneously wondered why the lighting had gone all chaotic. Everyone pieced it together at the same time. THE FISH WAS IN THE LIGHTS
we found it in a random direction, very far away, in an empty pool all by itself. It was swimming determinedly against the current, as happy as anything. It had somehow gotten into the fishproof overhead lighting, which had a kind of long cage over the bulbs, and had flipped itself along the ceiling until it dropped down into a pool.
We just looked at that fucker. It was happy. “Good puzzle guys,” it was saying. “It took me a while to crack it but the solution was worth it. I think I’ve definitely earned my snack.”
I’m not proud of this next part, but I turned to the guy and said “I think I’ve discovered a limitation in your study,”
this was so wrong of me, with my own filthy mouth I said this; to this good man, this sweet man, this gentle fish biologist with his face streaked with gore,
@zooophagous this is “Marshmallow.” At first I thought she was freshly molted but it’s been several weeks and she’s still white with dark brown markings (they’ve gotten darker but her white is still bold). Can dubia roaches be leucistic?
Any given animal can be leucistic, and she absolutely looks like she is. I can see some transparent areas of exoskeleton.
VERY cool! I’d say set her aside in another container with a male and plenty of food, see if any babies have the same pattern. That’s a very pretty roach.
good: MA upheld trans rights, Michigan legalized pot and Utah legalized medical, Maryland got same-day voting registration, Nevada got AUTOMATIC voting registration and removed the pink tax, Oregon remains a sanctuary state and won’t restrict abortion funding, Florida gave back voting rights to ex-cons.
bad: North Carolina and Arkansas will require photo IDs for voters, West Virgnia and Alabama will restrict abortion funding
Weird: Florida passed a single ballot question that banned both offshore drilling and vaping in the workplace
and after discussing the Just Really Big Corn more with the person in question, I have some more information about the offending Really Big Corn (the pic is coming up dont worry):
-for those who are new to Exactly How Fucked Up Corn Is, corn, or Zea mays, is comprised of many varieties (called ‘landraces’) native to central and south america. They were first bred by the native peoples in the region from an ancient grass called Teosinte that’s still around today. theyre really fucked up. i cant talk about it here but trust me there’s a reason some people devote their entire lives to studying it
-the lab in question is a maize genomics lab, and does a lot of work with these landraces. sometimes this work involves bringing various kinds up to their lab at my university in Iowa to grow in test plots for experiments. you can see where this is going
-so the supercorn itself. the supercorn in question is actually a collection of a few different landraces from the valleys of mexico and south america. they are naturally taller than what we would consider ‘normal’ corn in their native environment, but like corn generally is when brought to Iowa, they’re really fucking happy here and are a little bit taller than their natural height to show for it (we get longer days here then they get where they’re from, resulting in the plant getting slightly different growth signals, so on so forth)
-i got the height wrong in the tags on the original post. my friend is 5 foot 7, not 5 foot 5. this corn is over 20 feet (6 meters) tall. they were grown from seed in this test plot. she says the stalks are as thick as bamboo to compensate for the sheer height. behold the image that’s haunted me for literally months:
look you guys. i dunno what the hell kinda history books youve been reading about pre-serum steve, but ‘poor sick’ steve was pretty much the literal devil.
i am not joking. he was pretty much the definition of ‘lead you right into temptation’ if you assume that what youre being tempted to do is get in so many fistfights.
so. many. i coulda really used a sickass robot arm back in the day, because my goodness did i do a lotta punching.
anyway, sick steve went through four stages, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, except he turned from a tiny angry man with the ability to breathe into a tiny angry man with the ability to pass out with zero warning. stage one was called ‘Im Not Sick, I Always Breathe Like This,’ and did indeed involve steve wheezing a lot. usually that was the first sign. but tiny steve had asthma, so sometimes he really did just breathe like that. at this stage, steve would insist that he was ‘fine, bucky, honestly stop glaring at my lungs. you cant even see them.’
the second stage was called ‘So Maybe I Might Be Sick But Im Still Fine Though,’ and pretty much came into play when steve stopped being able to get a whole word out without gasping in the middle. fun fact? steve’s eyebrows did not grow when he got the super serum, so if you think his angry face is bad now, just imagine allll that scowl packed into steve’s itty bitty please-punch-me starter face.
stage three was ‘If Im Dying Im Gonna Go Out The Way I Came In, Screaming And Covered In Blood’ which was the stage where steve, despite the fact that he was supposed to be in bed, would try to sneak out and go do things. this wouldnt be so bad if 1. he wasnt prone to just suddenly passing out when he was sick, or 2. had had any control at all over what came out of his mouth. that thing steve does where if youre doing something he objects to morally, he will 100% of the time come over and inform you that you should be expecting a punch in the near future? yeah. tiny steve did that too. luckily his brain-to-mouth filter was improved by the serum, or im pretty sure he’d have started fights with a lot more than 117 countries and literally every nazi ever. Anyways, he’d try and sneak out, and if he succeeded, he would almost always wind up picking a fight with somebody, because having bad luck and terrible impulse control is what steve do.
the final stage was called ‘Bucky I Promise I Wont Do Anything Stupid, Please Stop Sitting On Me,’ and it was the point at which i started ignoring everything he said until he could say a whole sentence in one breath.
Chapter 10: Small but Full of Rage (and diseases) is updated on the Ao3!
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