onilecraM | Marcelino
Social Experimentation
Yesterday afternoon was bad. The fish I picked out at PetSmart died on the way home. He really didn’t have much of a chance. Liz wasn’t happy. It was supposed to clean her fish tank. She even suggested that the fish wasn’t moving too much, but I told her that’s how Pleco’s are. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.
Liz went back today and returned the frozen Pleco. They gave her another one to clean her socially saturated 2-gallon fish tank. She had 6 Neon Tetras in there (Actually, there were only five. She left one in the net when she cleaned it out last week and it died.) For some reason, the PetSmart sales clerk in the aquarium department (who must have been on crack) told her she could get seven more Neon Tetras for the tank because they are social “schooling” fish. I told her that her fish tank is a social experiment, like one of those intro computer programming assignments where you randomly genereate several “organisms” in a 2x2 matrix, and watch the effects on the adjacent cells through subsequent “generations.”
Liz didn’t take too kindly to that remark, but it is true. If she was having ammonia problems with five fish, (which is why I suggested she buy a Pleco, a bottom dwelling cleaner-fish) I can only imagine the fun now with thirteen. It will become my research experiment for the summer. How long will it take for these things to kill each other? The normally pacifist Tetra transforms into a violent mass of blue and red when subjected to twelve neigbors in a small environment… That is my hypothesis. My alternate hypothesis is that the algae-eating Pleco, in an effort to promote social darwinism, will become a carnivore and devour the Tetras one by one, until the remaining fish fulfill the maximum value of the Predator-Prey equation, and the Pleco will return to eating algae. (I am really glad I took Diff-Eq’s, I understand it now). We shall see. I will keep you posted on the status of the social experiment.
In other news, I need to write my MUN position papers. I also need to study more orgo. Wow, what a summer - I live on the edge….
