windthread

don't know if this will work.  Typepad is having trouble this eve.  so…maybe or maybe not.

it's dinnertime and as we eat,  we talk.  I am still here with this being and we are talking about how we watched Utubes and read about Snails.  How Julian had brought home some snails from his old Montesori School garden.  How Alyssia had loved them so much.  How i won't let anything here be "kept".  Feelings of Julian about that but we go along and remember how we know that snails can change gender if they  feel the need.  and thought about going to read that again,  but he changed the subject to something he'd read yesterday.  His homework entails reading an hour a day,  after school….and he'd finished his book and so got a National Geographic out of the drawer to finish off the time.  He found it again and wanted Alyssia to read it aloud, which she did.

"Crustacean assignation  Patricia Edmonds

To a lobster couple,  this is normal sex:  For days the female squirts urine into the den of her desired mate.  (not unlike Goats, we note)  Beguiled by the scent,  he lets her move in.  Foreplay…stroking each other with antennae and with feet covered in taste receptors….lasts several days.

Once she's convinced that he'll protect her,  the female disrobes,  slowly shedding both her hard shell and the pouch where she had banked sperm from a prior mate.  Molting leaves her in a perilously soft new shell,  so he stands guard for the half hour it takes to harden.  Then,  supported by his claw legs,  he suspends himself above her and lifts her to face him, cradling her in his legs.  Her new shell has a new sperm pouch,  he thrusts a packet of sperm into it using appendages called gonopods.  The deed is done.

As soon as one mate leaves,  the male will welcome another.  The female,  meanwhile,  will use the sperm packet to fertilize thousands of eggs,  which she'll carry under her tail for about a year until the larvae hatch.  (a YEAR!)

it goes on.

But climate change is threatening this babymaking process, says Diane Cowan,  founder of the Lobster Conservancy.  When water is warm,  lobsters put their energy into growing.  When it's cold, winter water temperatures in the 30's Farenheit…they put their energy into making eggs and sperm.  Cowan says if climate changes shorten that cold period,  they'll produce fewer gametes.  And if it's steadily too warm,  they just won't produce.  No eggs…No sperm.  No lobsters."

THIS is how to learn about things.  At the kitchen table.  During dinner.   Our Hill Snail.  Lobsters.   For this,  i am deeply grateful.