Getting students to do hands-on activities like terrarium making is invigorating for this old man, especially since I get to bring home a terrarium myself. Being the dedicated teacher that I am, I made space for my creative juices to gel, enabling me to make this poster that covers concepts of the water cycle and photosynthesis.
A task in the son’s “I’m a Young Zoologist” project requires us (because let’s get real, I’m the one who does most of the work) to research on snail-related experiments. What a coincidence! I can just adapt this poster and use it to get the boy to type a response. No need to milk time out to do research.
Put some plants inside a terrarium under sunlight. Then add in a snail. The snail can live as it eats plants and breathes oxygen given out by the plants. The wet soil provides water for the snail.
After I fervently told the boy my plan, he asked me to Google whether snails in Singapore are poisonous. That’s how I learnt that most land snails in Singapore aren’t, but some marine snails are venomous.
I like how one morsel of knowledge paves the way for other knowledge tidbits to gather in the mind. It’s analogous to crystal growing.
Did you get far enough in snail research to learn about "love darts"?
I didn’t! You had me Googling it.
Just the kind of fact that will tickle him pink.
We discussed before how the female praying mantis eats her sexual partner alive as well as how the male anglerfish gets subsumed into the body of his female partner. He digs it all
I'm not sure I had heard the anglerfish one
Here you go!
But by the time he has found her, there is a good chance he's been beaten to the punch. The small suitor will often share his partner with upwards of six other males.
Undeterred, he uses his small, sharp teeth to latch onto his intended's side, holding on for the rest of his (and her) life.
In some species the male becomes a permanent parasite on the female, his small body left simply trailing along in the water beside hers. Slowly he fuses to her, becoming an irremovable appendage.
In this relationship he is completely catered for. He no longer needs his eyes, so he loses the ability to use them and relies on his host for all of his nutrition. Even his bloodstream eventually connects with hers.
But he is an integral addition to her life, because the vital thing that that the male provides is a constant supply of sperm. This ensures that the female can produce fertile eggs for the rest of her life, making him vital to species survival.
I think I had read about this before, but didn't remember.
It's like they basically revert back to a fetal state. A fetal state that also makes sperm.
I might have forgotten about it too if it weren’t my son who keeps reminding about it. Idk why it captures his imagination so much.
Another of his obsessions: humans have the same number of neck bones as giraffes — 7