Reductio ad absurdum

Ambush hunters

Part 3 of the comic

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

"They come to my class every day. And they're all going to end up in a Mad Max nightmare world if we don't solve this problem. Yeah, i was wrong about the water. I don't care about that. i care about those kids. So give me some gosh-darned Astrophage!" - PHM pg 70

Below is timelapse, non-text version and snapshots of the progress :3

one leg is a short? did he cut the leg off one of the pants? is that what he's wearing on his head?!

oh my god it is

he wanted a hat so he cut off a sweatpant leg and tied a knot in it

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.

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