busily missing God knows what.

The ones being sold are WILD CAUGHT. They're being found MISLABELED for sex (females labeled as males etc), and no consideration is being given to the fact that wild caught jumping spider females are pretty much ALWAYS GRAVID. They mate once and will lay around 5 clutches of 25+ eggs each clutch. Since they're only native to a few states, releasing spiderlings means potentially introducing invasive animals, meaning the choice comes down to raising a hundred or more babies or euthanizing a hundred or more babies.

Ilya smiled at the understatement.

"We couldn't be prouder of the man he's become,' David continued. "I don't have any Stanley Cup rings, but I have Shane.''

Chapter 39, The Long Game

....

It's Christmas of 1988.

There's one more present under the tree, and Yuna's eyes are dancing as she hands it to David. He opens it to find the tiniest pair of shoes he's ever seen.

"No. Really?" He's dizzy.

"Really," Yuna grins, and her eyes are shining with tears, and David loves that face more than anything. He hopes their baby looks just like her.

.....

It's a bitterly cold day in February of 1989 when David puts the shoes away. He pushes down all the anger of it's not fair, why us, why our baby. Yuna needs him.

The doctor had said you're young, you can try again.

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.

But I think FMA does also does an excellent job choosing when to not let Ed come out on top. We just had the Nina episode and now Ed is in the middle of processing his first "catastrophic failure to save someone" type of failure since attempting to bring his mom back. He's dealing with a low that's absolutely hampering his abilities and the tonal shift hits for me in the way that 1) he doesn't notice Scar's initial attack against him (Al has to pull him away) and 2) Ed absolutely freezes up just thinking "This is bad."

This is, perhaps, baby's first "someone is coming at you with the full, concentrated, explicit intention of killing you" and Ed is so genuinely out of his depth with it. He really does try. He gets immediately bested. He's staring at a situation where Al is directly in harm's way. And Ed just lies down to die like a dog...

The whole metaverse can no longer be properly viewed without an account and I am definitely not making one just to see your contact info or opening hours.