Subject: Re: Animal friends in jars
Author:
Posted on: 2012-06-29 00:03:00 UTC
We had lots and lots of preserved octopi and squids, and starfish, and all kinds of crabs and lobsters. (Including our mascot, Skippy the slipper lobster! So named because he had been stored in a former peanut butter jar.) Also a few insects and spiders, one of which was a disturbingly large tarantula found in a local garage, according to the label. Also, bedbugs from actual students' dorms! There was also a dry collection of seashells, which a Native American cleaning woman once stopped me to tell me about their significance in her culture. Very cool!
Most of the collection was from the seventies, and had fallen into disrepair before my Invert Bio teacher inherited it. Two girls and I volunteered to help him out with cataloging and re-preserving things that had run out of formaldehyde. There were some sad sights. Crabs that had dissolved into a puzzle of limbs and carapace bits. Sea slugs that had lost all their formaldehyde and shriveled into teeny little raisins (although amazingly, adding new formaldehyde actually restored some of those to the point where they almost looked living again). Also, we finally figured out why the room smelled just a bit worse than it should: a bucket of squids whose lid had never quite been fastened on all the way had been sitting behind the door under a pile of other buckets since about 1990.
. . . That kind of got long-winded. Sorry!