Sounding Board

HUGE red flag by Bonesaw tbh

Nobody talks about this but her art is actually SUPER problematic.

First off, ONE of her guerilla sculptures, the anatomical piece she put up in the walk-in freezer of a rec center in Brockton Bay was APPARENTLY made with unethically sourced materials.

Not only that, but her red mist piece was put up all across Brockton Bay without consulting the city for environmental concerns, and was actually toxic, which hurt the most marginalized people in the city.

Then there's her "underwater" piece on sadness she set up under the harbor, which has the same problems as both of the pieces I mentioned, but also apparently had a widespread effect on the mental health of a LOT of people in the area.

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.

The Forest in the Ditto. Inspired by the Rene Magritte painting.