oh to be a night vale community radio intern

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

(purple=me, red=transmasc friend of mine)

sometimes it is genuinely sobering to be confronted with how little the average transmasc knows or thinks about the transmisogyny present in scociety and especially in systems that have power over us.

I don't say this to dunk on or insult my transmasc friend, he's a genuiniely wonderful person, I'm just baffled by the ignorance at play here.

he describes himself as an actuvist for trans rights. he didn't know about v-coding, or about trans women being denied access to domestic and sexual abuse help services for women, he didn't know how fucking bad the state of femenizing healthcare is because like many others, he heard "testosterone is a controlled substance and estrogen isn't" and concluded from that that getting on E must be easier, no further research needed.

but the most important part? when I pointed this out to him, he admitted his bias and promised to do better. he recognized how he had been ignorant of transfem's specific struggles because of his own marginalized status and reaffirmed his support.

I am so used to being met with hostility when discussing transmisogyny that this(the bare fucking minimum) was a genuine positive surprise to me in the moment.