trace the arteries to find my heart

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.

Something else I have noticed on top of what you describe is that very often transmascs (of any ‘type’, gender identity, sexuality, and so on) that are not medicalized or not medicalized enough to pass are ALSO sidelined and dismissed, if not outright treated with hostility, in LGBT+ spaces, including ones that explicitly say they are 'trans inclusive'. So we are also sidelined if a person in these spaces deems us to be 'too cishet', but in the opposite sense - too much like a cis woman whose masculinity is not 100% irrefutable and unclockable.

And this applies not just to transmascs that choose to have a more 'feminine' gender presentation, but also just as much to transmascs that DO style themselves as masculine as possible but get still read as ‘tryhard girls wanting to feel special’ by onlookers entirely because of physical characteristics they cannot (yet) change such as facial features, voice, height, visible breasts even through binders &/or tape, body fat distribution, etc.

So we’re essentially damned if we do and damned if we don’t: we either aren’t trying hard enough and are silly little girl interlopers bothering the Real Queers or, the second we start to pass a bit too well, we’re evil rapey threats scaring the Real Queers.

Back to my roots

I've been burned out for months and suddenly I have a silly idea haha