Two actually. She was pregnant.
I made arrangements a week ago to take my bio lab Monday instead of Friday since I'd have obligations to attend to. My lab partner and I were conducting sinister experiments on life. We tortured and nearly froze a crayfish to the point where it gave up trying to 'right' itself up. It gave up on life.. And then we boiled a pregnant mother. All in the name of science. We were Nazis. Seriously, I've been through the books. Nazi scientists would put prisoners in ice pools to register their physiological responses. It was the same thing we did today on a legally defenseless cray fish.
The mother, She came from the species known as daphnia. The picture above was taken by a htc 3.2 MP camera shot through the lens of a dissecting microscope. What you can't see from the picture is a blue figure near the bottom curve of her spine. Attached to her brood pouch was a little mini version of herself with a little black dot on it. It moved inside her as she did, and you could even make out the underdeveloped thoracic appendages wiggle. There was a tiny blue heart in there as well. Beat.. beat.. beat..
Our job was to record the beats per minute made by her heart. My lab partner got a base number under room temperature. Next was a beat number under saturated water. We didn't know.. The boiling drop of water that came from the pipette was already around her by the time we noticed she wasn't alone in there. Her heart's beats per minute did increase though, from 160 bpm to 180 bpm average. We didn't record data on her child's heart though.. darn.
So yeah, instead of throwing her down the sink where she would've faced certain death for her child, I took out the pipette again and located her from where she came from, a fish tank full of a 100 more daphnia. Forget about the fact that we purposefully boiled her and the fact that their existence take up less than (1/10)^3 mm in volume. I am a hero to an unborn daphnia.
