Boys will be Boys

Teaching High School Biology has been quite the experience as a homeschool mom. This is my second time teaching High School level Biology, as I taught the first two together. Well, as we started the Kingdom Animalia, I ordered my daphnia, and my adult brine shrimp to watch what they do. I also ordered Hydra for observation. We grew brine shrimp, (what we used to call "sea monkeys") which were very small. So, we look at the Phylum Cnidaria, and observed the different reactions to different stimuli, we also fed them the baby brine shrimp.

Okay, Biology class is over and I have these blue stained hydra, 1/2 a cup of daphnia and 1/2 a cup of adult brine shrimp, along with the baby brine shrimp that we grew. Now what do we do? I decide to buy 3 goldfish, when I make a cricket run for the toad, (that the boys caught in a local stream THREE years ago.) My plan is that the goldfish will eat the remaining daphnia and brine shrimp.

I get home and realize that the aquarium has the toad in it, so I pull out an old, big, glass, flower vase and I fill it with distilled water, lay the bag of fish in it, so that they can get used to the temperature of the water. After about 10 minutes the boys and I let the fish out of the bag and the boys each take a dropper full of daphnia and adult brine shrimp and put it in the fish "bowl" (vase). The fish LOVE the daphnia and brine shrimp and gobbled them down.

Well, the daphnia and brine shrimp lasted about 4 days. Then we had to give them regular old fish food. I did change them out of the dirty water, but, as is typical of feeder goldfish, at one week they died.

The boys assessed the situation and decided that they should do as the Indians taught the Pilgrims. They dug holes around the fruit trees in our backyard, and unceremoniously dumped the fish into the holes.

Boys will be boys!