Catching Cutlery

This Monday, I got to spend the afternoon at the Boston Children's Museum. The sun was shining and many families were out and about enjoying the nice weather. Little kids were shocked to see crabs scuttling around in our touch tanks and had a hard time believing they were real. One child had never even seen a fishing pole in real life! He ran up in amazement and asked me "is this what a fishing pole looks like?" I told him that this was indeed a real fishing pole and he could actually use it if he wanted to. He could not contain his excitement and begged his mother to let him try it. I baited their fishing pole and taught him how to carefully side cast into the water. He listened very carefully and followed every instruction I gave him, "I'm fishing, I'm fishing!" he cried out. He waited patiently for something to bite and after only a few minutes, he claimed he felt something pulling on the line. I told him to reel it in and he started to pull it up slowly. It did appear to have something on it, but I could not believe caught something that quickly. As he hoisted his catch over the railing, his face clouded with confusion as it appeared that he caught a plastic fork. At first he was disappointed, but I quickly stepped in to tell him what a cool catch he actually had. Upon further inspection, he had caught a few creatures on that plastic fork. On one side, there was a cluster of tunicates. On the other side, there was a small mollusk secured tightly. The little boy was fascinated and instantly proud of his first-timers luck and touted his fork proudly.

A freshly caught fork

The next few days of the week were spent at Spectacle Island. For sports we played football, volleyball, frisbee, and kickball. On Wednesday, we pulled up the crab trap up from the water and learned that we had caught a large number and variety of crabs overnight. We even had two small spider crabs. All of the children laughed at how strange looking the spider crabs were, but I reminded them that spider crabs are very neat and I am sure we look strange to them. Hopefully we keep up the good work with the spider catching and we get a fish soon!

Splayed out spider crab

Sea you out there,

Jennifer Leiendecker