Vet Tech Studies

Ohohoho

So there's this company in the UK, right. They brand themselves on producing fancy free range eggs and as part of that they have breed information written on the carton.

I did some snooping and found that every miracle news story of a supermarket egg hatching in the UK traced back to duck eggs, specifically the Braddock White duck eggs produced by this one company for the supermarket Waitrose.

And one day my mum brings them home and says "I bought these to eat but aren't they the ones that hatch?"

And it's spring and I'm hatching a ton this year so in they went.

On candling we had three fertile eggs! That's a fertility of 50% - the same as shipped eggs from a breeder!

Hatch day comes and we get 2 ducklings, Curie and Becquerel. Sadly, Curie contracts duck septicaemia from an infected navel and doesn't make it, but Becquerel is a healthy bird and growing like a weed.

I had put 4 breeder eggs in a week after them in case just one hatched, so Becque now has two Khaki Campbell cross friends called Tsuki and Hoshi so she isn't lonely.

And as of today's 7am Quacking - Becque is a female! Which means she's capable of laying eggs and therefore I have pirated a duck.

Helen the Pacific white-sided dolphin has passed away. Helen was rescued off the coast of Japan in 1996 after becoming entangled in fishing nets—a tragedy which cost her the majority of her pectoral fins and left her unable to return to the wild.

The young dolphin spent several years at Enoshima Aquarium before moving to Canada’s famed Vancouver Aquarium in 2005. Helen called Vancouver home until 2021, when she was transferred to SeaWorld San Antonio (since the Canadian government recently banned housing whales and dolphins in human care, the Vancouver Aquarium was unable to bring in a new companion for Helen after the death of her tank mate, rescued false killer whale Chester). She spent her final year in the company of San Antonio’s Pacific white-sided dolphin pod. Although her exact age is not known, Helen was estimated to be around 34 years old (according to NOAA, the average life expectancy of her species is 38 years).

Pure joy

Best friends

Adult cicadas actually do feed on tree fluids! But they do spend almost all of their time trying to mate. When it comes to fully losing the ability to feed, there's too many to count, and it manifests at every imaginable degree from adults with functioning mouths but vestigial digestive tracts to adults with no trace of either. Mayflies are probably the most famous "short lived" insect that doesn't typically have a mouth, but the larval stage of a mayfly lasts for years growing and feeding in streams or rivers, so myflies aren't "really" one of the shortest lived insects.

Adult bot flies are one example of a totally mouthless adult! I've posted before about how cute they can be but look how cute they can be! I know I keep pointing people to my spouse for more insect knowledge but @revretch has such a huge stockpile of research they could share sometime too. It's also not limited to insects, or even just invertebrates; there are some fish, especially in the deep sea, that also live only to mate and never feed. People know about the "parasitic" male anglerfish which technically doesn't feed on anything (he has to find a female to fuse with, and then her body will sustain him) but there's also an abyssal fish people called a "bignose" because, while it doesn't really look like it on the outside, it has disproportionately huge sinuses for picking up scents long distance, and it has no mouth or functional digestive tract. All bignoses are male, so we knew for a long time that the female must be something different that the bignoses exist to find. It later turned out to be another well known fish, the carnivorous Whalemouth, which had only ever turned up female specimens! And a third, still totally different fish we called a "tapetail" turned out to be the larval stage:

being a vet tech in covid is really just a lot of

1- The sterile field is lava! No touchy!

2- Practice standing with your arms bent, close to your body and your hands, palms facing you, held loosely near your chest. This is how you will *also* stand when scrubbed in but not touching anything yet. I do this in many places unless I actively think not to, at this point.

3- Always have your clipboard with your monitoring sheet in one hand and a pen in your other hand. If you must put them down, they go on the *floor* so you don't put them on the sterile field.

4- Don't let this become you:

Arms are a privilege, not a right near the sterile field.

5- Stand at the end of the animals that is farthest away from the actual surgery site. Unless you're monitoring anesthesia, in which case wedge yourself in the corner with the anesthetic machine, the fluid pump, and your pulse-ox/capnograph/temp/bp/ecg, where you can still see and check things. Keeping your arms untangled from the tubing and monitoring equipment will take up most of your movement ability.

6- Hands clasped behind your back unless you are writing/checking MMs, etc.

“Tortoise opening the new science lab at the University of Lincoln”

Porcupine likes warm hugs

I know that another fish might eat this bullfrog right after I spend months rehabilitating it.

I know that turning a beetle back onto its legs won’t save it from falling over again when I walk away.

I know that there is no cosmic reward waiting for my soul based on how many worms I pick off a hot sidewalk to put into the mud, or how many times I’ve helped a a raccoon climb out of a too-deep trashcan. 

I know things suffer, and things struggle, and things die uselessly all day long. I’m young and idealistic, but I’m not literally a child. I would never judge another person for walking by an injured bird, for ignoring a worm, or for not really caring about the fate of a frog in a pond full of, y’know, plenty of other frogs.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But I cannot cannot cannot look at something struggling and ignore it if I may have the power to help.

There is so much bad stuff in this world so far beyond my control, that I take comfort in the smallest, most thankless tasks. It’s a relief to say “I can help you in this moment,” even though they don’t understand.

I don’t need a devil’s advocate to tell me another fish probably ate that frog when I let it go, or that the raccoon probably ended up trapped in another dumpster the next night.

I know!!!! I know!!!!!!! But today I had the power to help! So I did! And it made me happy!

There was a big storm and a ton of starfish were washed onto the beach, stranded much further up than they could get back and beginning to bake in the post-storm sunshine. A little girl was walking down the beach, picking up starfish and throwing them back into the sea. Some guy comes up and asks her what she’s doing. “Saving the starfish,” she says.

He looks around at the huge beach and the hundreds of starfish, and says “You can’t possibly save them all. I’m afraid you’re not gonna make much of a difference.”

Kindness is not weakness.

Kindness is brave. Especially when you also know that your kindness might not be returned, may even be met with anger or cruelty. It’s reaching out with an open hand, knowing that it’s just as likely to be bitten as it is to be held. 

We are literally built for kindness.

the soft-furred tree mouse is a tiny lil rodent native to china! their little beady eyes are almost useless, so they get around by echolocating like bats.