Skip to main content

Wednesdays' Weirdos: Seahorse

Today I met with my favorite adult protection client and she was updating me on her online dating progress. I'm pleased to hear she has a new man and they have much in common when somehow in the course of our conversation she tells me she used to raise seahorses!

When she tells me this, I completely lose all pretense with regard to professionalism and am all "Nu, uh! No way, really?" And then I get her to tell me all about raising seahorses.

seahorse

She tells me that you order a pregnant male.
Yes, pregnant male.
At this point I start to worry that maybe my favorite APS client might be a crust shy of a pizza. So I clarify, "MALE... pregnant sea horse? What makes him male then?"

She shrugs and then describes making the salt water and how all these baby sea horses, like a hundred, burst from the male and go swimming around. Apparently baby seahorses are called 'fry' an unfortunate name, way too tasty sounding to mean simply 'baby.' There is a difference between calling your kid 'small fry' and 'tasty looking steak.' Her pet bird at the time apparently agreed with me and ate almost all the babies. She said he was like the bird you see bobbing in drinks, only he was eating her FRIES!
DrinkingBird
We talk about seahorses and her online boyfriend for a little longer and then I take her home feeling pleased with my day.

So when I get back to the office, I look it up.

Turns out she's RIGHT! The female sea horse deposits HER fertilized eggs into a sac in the male sea horse and he keeps 'em in there until they hatch and then out they go. You can check for yourself here. Or watch this weird video

I'm not sure why the embedding is disabled on this video but feel like I've accomplished something by finding something bizarre enough to have embedding disabled on it. Doesn't it have a weird Pee Wee's Playhouse feel to it?

Making them this week's Wednesday's Weirdo: Male Seahorses.

Incidentally, I tried talking Rob into carrying around a mucus sac with the parasite, you know, once there IS a parasite and he gave me an indescribable look that clearly meant, "No." And he hadn't even seen the PeeWee's Pervhouse Seahorse Birthing video. I'm not sure what's wrong with me, I've probably watched it half a dozen times now.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Where'd the monkeys in my hair go?

I promise I will post Wednesdays' Weirdos again next week, but the pictures for this week got trapped on my camera with a dead battery. Sorry. I suck. Instead I'll tell you a drinking story. We were in St. Louis visiting for the holidays and a rare opportunity to get annihilated with my girlfriends presented itself. I started out with two beers while I was waiting for the girls with Rob's friends. Then, when we got to the fancy-pants bar I switched to whiskey on the rocks. I'm at sea level so I think I can drink like a champ. Hmmm. After about three of these and I-don't-remember-how-many shots, I switched back to beer. Damn, I'm bright. At some point in the evening I realize that we're in a bar that used to be my favorite bar in the whole world. It was called Tangerine then. They had Go Go dancers on the bar and let you climb on it and had hand shaped chairs so your butt got held. They had trucker night where you got your drinks in mugs. They ha...

Dear Book Pimp

So I wrote this book and I think it's pretty decent. That's the feedback I'm getting anyway, which is bitchin' really since I have a degree in Education, NOT writing. Plus, this is my first try, so really I should be happy, right? But, turns out writing the book is maybe the easy part. The publishing is another story. You have to find a Literary Agent. To do this, you have to write a 1-3 page letter to many literary agents to convince them to read a sample chapter. Send it with a Self addressed stamped envelope (SASE) and wait. there's more but I'm already experiencing a high level anxiety just writing about this part. In my letter, I'm supposed to explain who I am, what my book's about, why I'm qualified to write it, why its sicky illy good, who'll read it, and on and on. AHHHHHhhhhh! This shit scares me. Also, I'm supposed to be witty, clever, literary, and junk. Oh and explain a 300 page book in a sales pitch. I'm not a frea...

Past tense

I work with this really kickass lawyer. She's been all crazy over this guy lately. He worked for probation. Past tense. Did you see it? Over the weekend he killed himself. Enter past tense, the unwelcome jerk. And I feel soooo terrible. And guilty. Because I tried it to. I talked about it a little in this post . Try #17 and on. That's where I talk about it. A little. And now when someone kills themselves, I feel guilty. Like what I did when I was 17 somehow makes me responsible for everyone who ever does it. Like because I tried it, I should know how to fix it. But there are tons of recovering drug addicts that can't tell you how to get sober. There are great thinkers that can't explain their ideas. And the fact is, no one can explain suicide.