Critters

Today I’ve been aching to blog, and since I missed my deadline for fRecipe fRidays, I couldn’t just do one about cooking.  I’d been feeling a bit down today, so I looked through some of my favorite pictures…and today, I am going to tell you about Audubon Camp.

This year at Audubon camp (an ecology camp for 11-12 year olds) I had the opportunity to teach Aquatic Biology with a good friend of mine, Matt.  Aquatic Bio was my favorite class when I went to camp there, so I was pumped.  I have to say, the best part of teaching the class was getting to catch and hold all the slimy critters. 

Here we’ve got a cute newt.  Or salamander (I’m a bit ashamed of myself for not remembering, but it’s got a flat tail so I’m thinking newt.  My dad will shake his head when he reads this.)  And just look at the bucket of creatures below it!  Wait until you see my picture of that…

Yes, a bucket full of amazing critters.  You see the tadpoles, crayfish, dragonfly larvae, and fish in there?  It’s amazing that we caught all of that in one little piece of lake.  (Seriously, maybe in a stretch of 3 yards in 3 feet deep water.  Matt sacrificed himself a bit more than I to obtain these darlings.  No credit to me for this one, my dad picked this soft-shell up with his bare hands.  (Random story: Dad teaches mammalogy at camp, and he shows off a bear arm to his classes by putting it on his arm and asking what it is.  Kids will say, “It’s a bear arm!” And Dad responds, “No it’s not, my arm is covered!  It’s not a bare arm!”  And the kids eventually figure it out.)

Now for some of the most amazing critters yet!

Wait a second, no, that’s not what I meant to put there…although those people are pretty cool.  (Was that corny enough for you?)

I’m willing to bet that most of my readers haven’t looked through a microscope at teeny planktons before.  If you have, you’re either from camp, took a great Biology lab, or are my parents.  But really.  Those are some nifty critters.  When you look at them in a jar of water, they are just tiny green specks floating.  But under a microscope they are completely different.  And if you look at the very bottom plankton, you will see the REAL-LIFE version of Plankton from SpongeBob.  Not joking. 

If this post grosses you out, you should go outside more often.  There are some really amazing things that you are missing.

P.S. I am disappointed in my spell check for knowing that the first “B” in SpongeBob needed to be capitalized, but not knowing that mammalogy is a real word.