another life blog

Earlier this evening, I finished A Feast for Crows and prepared myself for a romp back to the lab to visit my cute Drosophila melanogasters. Of course, I took my sweet time, not wanting to sit through another 2 hours of neck-breaking exercise in extreme patience. The day before, BlockBuster had called informing me that if I don’t return MK: Shaolin Monk, they’re a gonna hafta charge me for it – so I knew on the way to the lab, I would have to drop it off. Of course, if I’m going to BB, I might as well rent something new~!

With my free coupon in hand, and Boston Market meal in the car, I was still deciding whether I should do lab work today, or just turn the D. melanogasters over and go home to eat. There’re only three games I had wanted to rent – the first was Path of Neo, second was Star Wars: Battle Front II, and third was Ninja Gaiden Black. When I got back to the car with NGB in my hand, I was thinking of flipping a coin to decide what I should do at the lab. Then I thought, “I could always do it tomorrow…”

When I got to the lab, with my mind intent on just turning the bottle over, my eyes invariably glanced at the one I would have picked the wall crawlers out of if I was going to work. Without thinking, I picked it up, and looked at them and thought…

“damnit, what fat third instars! I gotta kill me some today!”

Allow me to explain the idea behind fat wall crawlers. See, D. melanogasters have a life cycle of 10 days. This means, soon as a male egg is squeezed out of its mama’s butt, it’s going want to have sex with her in just 10 days. Within the short 10 days, there are only about 2 that they crawl about as instars before coming a pupae and undergoing metamorphosis. During those 2 days, there’re only like about 24 hours window that I can kill them.

Take a guess how many bottles I have =)

So anyway – instars that I have to pick from, comes in all shapes and sizes… erm, actually just sizes, they all look the same. Some are big, some are small. Some have blue guts, some don’t. I want BIG 3rd instars with blue guts. The bigger the 3rd instar, the better. And I don’t even need to compare the size next to each other, I know a big 3rd instar when I see one! See, small crawlers tend to have underdeveloped imaginal discs, and often times don’t evert well. Hell, the discs are rather impossible to pick out, so I would discard the whole tiny thing anyway. So the bigger they are, the easier it is to get them imaginal discs.

Today, they were as big as I ever seen them! They were gigantic! HUGE! KING KONG DONG SIZED! There are many things that affects how big a 3rd instar gets in my little bottles. 1) How many others there are in the bottle 2) How moist is the bottle 3) How much yeast is in the bottle 4) What day of the month it is 5) What lunar cycle it is 6) Whether they are homosexual or not … and other various reasons

Getting big 3rd instar in the bottle, is a rare occurance. When my sight laid upon the bottle, the desire to pick them out, rip them apart, and pick out their organs one by one was overwhelming. Ahh… thanks to my professors, I’ve became a freak.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2005 at 3:23 am and is filed under my life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.