Yes, they were the lives of crayfish, but who’s to say they don’t value their existence as much as we do ours? As I walked out of the building today, and past the big pond, I came upon two crayfish on the sidewalk. When I approached them, they made cool threat displays like the one below, spreading their forelegs and waving their fearsome claws. I have been here nearly 30 years, and this is the first time I’ve seen these “mud bugs.”
A passerby who works in my department told me that they come out once a year in some weird migration, and many actually enter the biology buildings, doomed to die from desiccation. So I put both crayfish back in the pond, perhaps only a temporary reprieve.
As the Talmud says, “Whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” I like that phrase (remember it from “Schindler’s List”?). I’m sure that phrase refers to human lives only, but I prefer to interpret it as including crayfish. So I saved the entire world twice today: not a bad feat!
That’s brilliant, Jerry. I am with you. If a bug gets in the house, we put a glass over it and take it outside.
At least you saved most of two crayfish. It looks like the one in the picture lost an antenna.
My father was very much of this sentiment. He would capture spiders in the house and move them outdoors. I’m not quite as fussy myself, but I always think admiringly of his generosity.
I’m reminded of the Jains who take animal life very seriously indeed. I remember a program where paleontologists were digging in Pakistan using local Jain diggers. They had to sift through to remove all the worms in the soil before the scientists could proceed.
I do that too. One spider last week was in the shower and when I saw it, I turned off the shower and got out to find a container but the spider decided to jump down the drain to its doom before I could find a container. Silly spider.
I also take all the spiders outside, and let them go on the plants. Can’t say I’ve ever seen any crayfish in my house.
Roaches, on the other hand…
Who knows what their progeny may become a million years or so from now if they survive and reproduce.
Know more by the name Crawdads around here. Always considered good bait for fishing. They can really dig nice holes in the wet ground, sometimes several feet down.
I know they eat them down south but would not see that around here.
There are crayfish in Chicago?
Apparently! That’s not an illusion up there!
How in hell did they survive that winter? (or perhaps someone in Marine Bio keeps restocking the ponds?) Weird.
In the early 70s I lived on a military base near Kansas City Missouri. We had crawdads there, and though not as cold as Chicago I’m sure, it froze every winter. We used to catch them all the time. Learned where to look for them by watching the raccoons catch them.
The maximum density of water is at 4 degrees (no, not the American ones, proper degrees), so few ponds freeze more than a foot or so thick.
Oh, SP3 orbitals and hydrogen bonding! Hail!
Sweden has a system where the blood you donate gets tracked and when it’s saves someone’s life you get a text message letting you know. Pretty awesome idea.
That’s a great way to promote blood donation.
That IS an excellent way! South of Chicago, they give out cheap, tacky merchandise, when all I really want to know that I am doing some actualgood. We should adopt that practice!
I would be encouraged to go back to give again. Even though I’d go anyway.
I gave up blood donation when I was doing a lot of diving. The lack of rbc when you dive is a risk. But, I’ve backed off from those dive trips and can now give on a regular basis.
First I’ve heard of it. How much of a risk, and by what path? I’ve known people who’ve dived out of quite severe places with injuries of multiple fractures and significant blood loss, who didn’t report any physiological problems.
I’m talking about the risk of decompression sickness in scuba. It is critical that absorbed nitrogen be off-gassed before surfacing. Low blood volume reduces the exchange rate.
You’d have to lose serious amounts of blood – life-threatening amounts, I suspect – for that to be a real concern. Like I say – I’ve known people who’ve lost several pints of blood to compound fractures (and more seriously, smashed teeth and a broken jaw in one case ; hard to keep the gag in the gob) and have survived the series of dives to get back to open air and the rescue team. None of the dives were particularly deep – max of 35 or so feet – but with 9 stacked one after the other on the way in, and the same on the way out, there’s some non-trivial nitrogen loading going on.
Hang on – you also specified that it was “rbc” that were the problem. That would be “red blood cell”? But nitrogen is moved under passive partition into the blood plasma, not actively transported in the haemoglobin. The reason for feeding a bent diver on pure oxy is to lower the PP/N2 in the lungs to improve N2 elimination (with a minor side effect of boosting passive dissolution of oxy into the plasma, to improve oxygenation of any tissues isolated from circulation by an embolism.
I can see how the story is appealing, but that medical explanation doesn’t convince me.
If I’m passing the hyperbaric centre at a convenient time, I’ll see if I can get a comment from the horse’s mouth. Or a diving doctor. Or a life-support tech. Someone who knows more about diving physiology than I do.
I learned this in training as a recreational diver. You’re probably right about the RBC being not a factor, just plasma. And, you may be right that it’s not a serious risk if you are down a pint or less, but it’s what we were warned about. The risk is affected by many factors such as lack of fitness, amount of body fat, exposure to cold or sun, depth and duration of dives, repeated diving on the same day, etc. The idea is you want to minimize all of these risks to dive as safely as possible. Depths beyond 60 feet are considered significant. Some of our dives were to 100 feet with up to 5 dives per day. Just playing it safe.
I always do this sort of stuff. Why not?
Crayfish and college memories …
Our Psych 101 lecture class at Colgate University had an “animal experiments” lecture (this was 1982). The prof spent a day demonstrating basic animal behavior modification setups.
Comedy gold (crayfish at the end of the story).
Nothing went right.
Rats: electrified cage floor and a short barrier to jump over and escape. Professor: “I turned the voltage down a bit because normally the rat defecates and urinates, and I don’t want to seem crusl.” Ummm … OK … and the rat just sits there, takes the shock and trembles.
Rats again: Y maze. The rat goes to a door. Professor – “I wasn’t told which door this rat was trained to go to. Clearly it is door 1.” The rat goes to door 2 the next 6 times. Every time, the professor claims that the rat got it wrong and withholds the treat…
Goldfish: Electric shock tank – trying to get them to switch ends … apparatus was broken.
Finally, Crayfish. This was the grand finale!
It was a large, computerized, black, plexiglass, 3-armed maze. A the end of each arm is a light and a small tank. There is a motorized platform in each pool … the computer lifts the platform, with the crayfish, out of the water. If the animal wants not to suffocate, it has to go to the arm with the light on. The crayfish breaks an electric eye beam as it enters the tank at the end of the lit arm, starting a timer and repeating the process ad-infinitum …
Does this seem as cruel to you as it does me?
… and the crayfish bites the CRAP out of the professor’s thumb. He yells, jumps, and the crayfish is flung all the way from the middle of the stage into the aisle 3 or 4 rows back.
End of lecture. That crayfish was my hero.
Saved so that one day we can have gumbo, or something 😉 Or is that another species?
As the link says, they really don’t like polluted water (and tend to escape too small habitats), so I guess the pond in the fall isn’t a good environment for them.
Putting them back is probably only prolonging their suffering. I learned that from naively putting toads back, who has similar ideas on winter habitats.
I was thinking along the same lines. What if these crawdads were trying to commit suicide, or escape an intolerable situation? Would Dr. Coyne’s karma change? It reminded me (somewhat) of the time my sister was patting herself on the back for picking up a turtle she found wandering far away from the lake and carrying it back to the shoreline. She didn’t know that the turtle was probably looking for a safe place on land to lay its eggs.
The suicidal crawdads sounds like a good name for a band.
Song:
“You get a line and I’ll get a pole, honey,
You get a line and I’ll get a pole, babe,
You get a line and I’ll get a pole,
Crawdad fishin’ in the crawdad hole
Honey, baby mine.”
> “Whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” I like that phrase
I despise it — at least as a prescriptive statement.
It embodies the deadly bias of scope insensitivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_neglect
That seems to me an over-interpretation of the phrase. The phrase doesn’t say anything about extending to more than one instance. It doesn’t necessarily help with the bias, true, but it doesn’t necessarily hinder it either.
In fact, once you account for the extending, I think it captures quite nicely the feeling of one’s consciousness being one’s whole world, and emphasizes how precious it is as a result (and how phenomenal it must be with a larger number of lives).
Circular net on a wire frame, on a string to a pole, with a bit of bacon tied in the middle of the net, a six gallon bucket. Two six packs of beer. A stream in Dalarna Sweden. Let down the net for the time it takes to drink the beer. Lift the net, tip the crayfish into the bucket. Repeat until the beer is finished.
Hand over bucket to wife or girlfriend.
About 20 minutes later, sit down at table and eat crayfish with melted butter and freshly made bread.
Wife or girlfriend probably cooks the crayfish in boiling water until pink, about 10 minutes and has made the bread in a dutch oven while you were out hunting, but then you’re the hunter and such detail should not bother you.
Living with nature is GREAT!
*Ahem*
I assume you did the dishes, right?
No, I’d had too much beer! I noticed a reference to the Talmud on saving life. I also think the Talmud as something to say about Crayfish. My Israeli buddy says his worse nightmare is to be invited for dinner that starts with Shrimp Cocktail and goes on to Veal Marsala or braised Pork Loin! Personally speaking, I enjoy cooking and will happily cater for all tastes as friends are valuable even if they don’t share my views!
Palaeo diet?
Palaeo diet, with attendant parasites, diseases, traumas and man-eating wildlife?
I free the spiders, bees, and wasps from mine house since they are righteous beings who please me. But being the capricious god that I am, the flies trigger my ire and so I smite them with a rolled newspaper, or rain chemical death upon them with the Holy Bug Spray.
Stupid earwigs crawl into the hose of my water barrels so when I take the water out for my fish tank, I have to rescue them with blades of grass from the container I use to transport the water to my fish tank.
Once a bee got in there and I had to dump the whole thing. He was so wet that he had to wait a bit to fly. I also booted out a spider by shaking him out. He seemed peeved as that had been the second time and I imagined him grumbling as he sauntered off.
What about putting a screen over your rain barrel? Of course then you’d miss out on these entertaining dispositions.
The rain barrel is closed at the top. This is the end of the hose they climb into.
In that case, perhaps a strip of duct tape. 😎
“A flea and a fly were caught in a flue,
So what one earth were they going to do?
Said the flea, ‘Let us fly!’
Said the fly, ‘Let us flee!’
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”
Three or less of anything, I can handle with catch-and-release. But fly infestations call for fly paper, as unpleasant as it is. (Can’t breathe with aerosal sprays.) Fly infestations were introduced to me by my mother, who would open a window and put an open can of tuna fish on the ledge, because “the flies needed to eat, too.” This is what dementia did to someone who was kind and generous to all living things.
We invested in a couple of Venus Fly Traps. The Drosophila population in this household is now much reduced!
That was nice. I wonder when i walk in the bathroom and there is a spider it runs from me.How does it know its in danger. I don’t kill it but get my son to.
It’s at times like this that the natural world gets me down. You save one or two lives, and meanwhile there are quadrillions more who won’t live long enough to meet the setting sun. And those are just the ones that die rather than suffer. And those are just today’s, in a slice of time cut out of hundreds of millions of years of this sort of thing going on.
“Nature… is what we are put on this Earth to rise above.” I couldn’t agree more if I tried.
My Hero!
Awesome, we do the same with various lizards we find indoors.
My first encounter with crawfish was at the age of 11 in the Barbasheila creek behind our family’s new home in Stone Mountain, GA. My mother promised to cook them up if I gathered enough of them. At the time i thought that was a terrible idea. Now i love to eat mudbugs.
We used to be nice to spiders until my husband got four bites from a brown recluse and had to have surgery to remove the g*dawful lesions.
Ouch! My friend got bitten by a yellow sac spider.
I have known people who seem to have a concentration of brown recluses in their house. I like spiders, but they are not welcome.
I once worked at a fish hatchery. When we drained a pond, there would be thousands of crayfish exposed. As you walked among them, they’d do the crowd wave.
Good job saving those crayfish!
I saved a beetle who looked like it had been in a skirmish. It was missing an antenna and half a leg. I moved it where it wouldn’t get squished.
Decades ago, back when Southern California had some surface water, I tried to drive across a stream bed only to be threatened by one of these little beasts rearing up out of the water and waving its claws at my oncoming car. That is really the only time my presence has been acknowledged by a crustacean, and I was actually quite charmed by the encounter.
Pacifastacus leniusculus AKA the American Signal Crayfish, introduced to Europe in the 1960’s and becoming a menace as it is outcompeting the native varieties and spreading a disease to which the natives have no resistance. Similar to when white people colonise the lands of indigenous people.
A cat would have eaten them. PCC defies his true nature!