When I first found some triops by accident, back in 2010, they absolutely blew my mind. The next time I found a few, in 2018, I was excited to see them but they seemed less alien because I knew what they were. And since they lived in puddles quite close to home, I knew where to find them.

Triops eggs can dry up and lie dormant for extended periods, which allows them to live in the desert. They need good rain to hatch, and it takes two or three weeks for them to grow to adulthood. Their lifespan is 60-90 days in good conditions, but of course conditions don't always cooperate.

This year we had a nice monsoon, with steady rain starting in late June. I saw the first triops in Palominas at the beginning of August, and found this bunch a week or so later. I have never seen them laying eggs before, but that was clearly what they were doing as they made little dips in the mud by swishing their shrimp tails.

When I went looking for them at the end of the month, with a friend who was excited to see some triops, there were still good puddles but not a triops (or even a tadpole) to be found. At least I know they had a chance to lay eggs.

The Anishinabek Nation stands in solidarity with Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, which has experienced devastation from the recent wildfires, displacing all citizens from their homes and community.

In the spirit of Ngo Dwe Waangazid Anishinaabe (One Anishinaabe Family), the Anishinabek Nation is accepting donations on behalf of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation to help the community navigate through this crisis. If you are able to, please donate via e-transfer to: [email protected]

Donations can also be made by credit card through PayPal or Canada Helps with further information at https://an7gc.ca/donate/

100% of donations are dedicated to supporting Namaygoosisagagun emergency response and community recovery efforts.

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This is a parasite that usually causes about 3000 cases of illness per year in the USA, Michigan currently has reported about 2900 (the confusion about “Michigan outbreak” is because Michigan is the first that caught an uptick in cases and has been very proactive about trying to trace them). Last official update from Massachusetts was 18 cases here centered in Greater Boston. The CDC recommends NOT assuming there are no sources of the parasite in your state even if no cases have been reported.

It isn’t an unknown illness but it is an unusual quantity of cases, and the fact that they haven’t been able to pin down the source after weeks of tracking is what makes it particularly concerning this year (harder to contain).

[The doctor's] choice of word sits oddly between us — not endured or suffered or managed, but experienced, as if it’s experience I don’t want. It’s not suffering I’ve come here about, it’s not that I want to alleviate some suffering but that I want her to make me stop having experiences. In that word is the very sum of her chastening, again, as you would a child: you want the world to be simple, fair and free of all difficulty, but the world isn’t that way and the sooner you recognise that I can’t immunise you to your own life — the sooner you grow up — the better.

This is surely something women get more than men — this message that they need to learn to put up with things. I read somewhere that women are far more likely to be told by a doctor that their symptoms are stress, while men’s symptoms will be investigated and more often referred. By stress, it’s meant that women are complicating and compounding their experiences in a way that could be avoidable if only they did breathing and gratitude exercises and stopped being surprised by the inevitabilities of their lives — the feelings of premenstrual rage, the loss of pelvic floor muscles in pregnancy, the loss of bowel control in childbirth, the loss of sleep in menopause, the subjection to various and subtly ubiquitous inequalities and injustices that affect every corner of their lives, the subsuming of oneself […] to the point that the sense of self becomes so vague as to be virtually derelict and not a self at all, only a roughly amassed set of duties and culpabilities and failures […].

No catastrophising, [the doctor] says softly. No catastrophising, I say.

I’m not sure now if I feel like a child or a person standing in front of a magistrate in a district court, someone promising to change her ways and be a good citizen and stop being a burden on society. The child is meek and innocent, the person in court meek and guilty. I can't decide which I am. »

Picture from the Photographer Kalynn Youngblood, in her series Staged Portraiture and Documenting daily Black Life.