April 2009 Archives

The particulars of my capture in those wild waters of eastern Maine elude my memory altogether.  From dreams and from the tales of others, I have, in my modest brain, a sort of piecemeal mishmash of what might have taken place.  Late at night, in the cool waters below, my mind spins and tumbles with visions of medieval iron-spiked crayfish traps and a horrifying loss of innocence.  Only the crayfisher knows what really happened.

What I do remember is a healthy bit of frantic clawing, and then splashing into the confines of a tank.  Then turbulence.  Then bubbles.  Then floating particulates.  When the water cleared, I gazed through the glass and saw her...Princess.

She was not of my species, and she was mysterious.  Her body language was alien to me, yet familiar in some intangible manner.  Perhaps in the wild she would have been my competitor or foe, but here, through the two panes of glass, her visage spoke to me with a kind of intrigue--a kind of allure.

Only rarely could I catch sight of her, as she would only move about when she believed herself to be unobserved.  I have included a single apt photograph from our time in the same laboratory.  Such glimpses were the very inspiration that guided me through those first weeks of captivity--yet they would be my undoing, for there was another who eyed her as I did, and he and I were destined to meet.

Once again, I have tarried in complacency.  A twennight has elapsed between the present and previous compositions, and yet each time I reach for my quill and parchment, I find myself without words.  Days pass in uniformity, and recollections of my former adventures recede into the pea soup fog of memory.

Since my home makeover, little has transpired.  I take pleasure in my renovated surroundings, and I continue to accumulate biomass in preparation for my next molt.  I even had the joy of sampling a bit of scallop yesterweek, which I nearly inhaled, with great relish.  Other than that small highlight, there is naught to report.

These uneventful times provide ample opportunity to compose the second chapter of my life history.  Unfortunately, the repetitive diel rhythms--and indeed the very lack of eventfulness--continue to obscure my memories.  My only hope is that the changing of the seasons will arouse my memory.  We invasive crayfish do, after all, possess superior memories to the native species (Hazlett et al. 2002).

In the mean time, I would like to thank my dear readers, who, I have recently learned, hail from hither and yon.  In addition to readership throughout my home state of Maine, there are readers from 23 states and nine countries!  Ah, if I could only visit the far off lands of South Korea or Thailand--Italy or Sweeden--and converse with those oganisms who read my tales.  Yet I find comfort in the knowledge that my words reach these distant lands--and I find new motivation to write.