Work Pets!

At work we have sea creatures for.....experiments, and sea creatures for pets!

We order urchins, mussels, mysids, etc. on a regular basis and when the boxes arrive we have to put them in flow through sea water tanks or drip bowls. Sometimes, there's a stowaway in the shipment! These animals are designated work pets and they have their own tanks. They're a bit different than the trout - the trout exists because we are a sick bunch of people and want to see how big he can get.

Alternatively, the work pets put some time and effort into sneaking into those specimen boxes and we all have our favorite little critters.

Pet tank selfie:

You can see that there are a wide variety of animals. We have a bat star, spined star, lots of brittle stars, urchins, a few different anemones, shrimp, and we had a lion's mane nudibranch at one point (may he rest in peace). My favorite animal in these tanks is the crab!

He looks friendly right?

No. I will not stick my hand in there if he is not distracted by food. His speed is considerable.

He also gets along well with his tank mates.

An escape has happened at least once. Perching on sea urchins is probably how he managed to get out of the tank in the first place. He went missing for an entire week before he was found and the poor guy was whole, minus a front claw. Considering he'd fallen the equivalent of 100 stories in crab measurements a missing claw isn't bad. It does not seem to hinder his mussel cracking skills, but most likely contributes to his bad attitude. Also, there is a cover on his tank now.

Most of these work pets were put into the tanks when they were fairly small, or else someone would have surely noticed them hiding away when sending us live animal shipments. While the crab and sea stars have grown a lot, we have a few babies that were recently added.

I thought I had found the smallest purple sea urchin last week that I'd ever seen before:

BUT a few days after this, Eric found a baby urchin hiding under an adult urchin in a recently delivered shipment. It's SO TINY.

We also have abalone!

I have only ever seen one abalone in the wild because their numbers are so low and I stare at these guys all the time. Have you ever seen one eat? They use their radula (essentially a tongue file) to scrape algae.

This is the last blog post before Terry and I get back from Hawaii because we are going to go watch this girl get married!!!

Fat Plants

Did you know succulents are also known as fat plants?

We have a wall of succulents at work and I LOVE living art. It's low maintenance, so I'm hoping to inspire someone else to make their own fat plant wall. Get to work!

The DO NOT BUY Edition

I had never even heard of these things before I moved here: the washer/dryer combo. I asked around in Bellingham and our friend Chris had used one when he lived in Japan, so it must have started in Europe/Asia where they save space and have all of their appliances in their kitchen. We've all seen those episodes of House Hunters.

I cannot emphasize this more - DO NOT BUY ONE. They are the laundry devil incarnate.

When I was getting a tour of this apartment, I asked where the dryer was because the closet it's located in clearly has space for a stackable set and I was only seeing one machine. Well, they pointed out, it's a double! A machine that washes and dries your clothes all in one!

What magic is this?

It's not magic I found out. It's bullshit.

Terry and I experimented with the machine when we first moved in. First we were messing with the electronic settings to try and select the correct configurations (too many options). When you select an option - normal wash, quick wash, delicates, extra spin, hot/cold, dry only, etc the damn thing adds more and more time onto the cycle. Terry called me into the bathroom where the laundry closet is and he was appalled at the reading after selecting the normal wash and dry cycle - ALMOST 5 HOURS it had indicated, before it was done.

No.

We messed with the selections and got a wash cycle that lasted for 30 minutes and then had to separately mess with the drying cycle after it was done. Dry for 30 minutes? How do you get it to "just dry" and not wash again?, is that the button? OH GOD it started washing again...and on and on. Anyway, it beeped after 30 minutes of sounding like an alien and our clothes were - you guessed it - wet. And not just damp either. Dripping. Ok, let's try another 30 minutes. How did we get it to "just dry" again? Yeah.

Want to know why our clothes weren't close to dry? This Satan machine uses a technique called steam drying. It dries your clothes by using hot water air...

After an hour of drying the clothes are still not all the way dry, but after reading online, turns out that's what is considered normal. We have to hang all of our clothes up immediately after the drying cycle is done to dry them completely with regular air and not water air. That's not it either. When the machine beeps to signal the end of the drying cycle it displays "Cd" and it locks the door. This symbol is still a mystery and we think it may mean child lock, but maybe it means "Crappy dryer" because it sucks. The only way to get the door to unlock is to turn the machine on and off again and wait about five minutes. Then the door will unlock. If you don't do this however, it will stay locked. I've returned thirty minutes after I heard the drying cycle beep and the door is still locked.

What a piece of crap.

The TROUT

New city = new blog!

I will post more about my new place and new job soon, but in the meantime I wanted to share one of my favorite parts about work. There are two newbies at work (me and another guy ironically named Eric) and we were thrown into work almost immediately last week because there was so much to do. It wasn't until yesterday that we started our official training and were shown around to all of the rooms in the lab.

One of the areas is full of little baby trout that they use for environmental experiments. Next to the tanks of baby fish is one tank with a monster trout. He is there because the people I work with are hilarious...and awesome. After experiments, there are always baby fish left over. They choose the largest of the batch to try to raise as big as they can and have him as a work pet (more on work pets later - there are several).

This specific trout has grown quite large and his diet is composed of...baby trout.

Other unused baby trout are occasionally scooped up and plopped into the pet trout's makeshift tank (circle of life, guys). And this fish goes absolutely nuts. Bananas. I swear he has fish brain damage because he hits his head into the side of the tank trying to ram his dinner to death. His forehead makes an audible "thunk". Every time. Eric and I cannot stop laughing - we look forward to trout feeding time.

The TROUT at work! We are working on a name for him and are open to suggestions: