Fish food at the LNFU

Today I fed pipettes full of teeny-weeny iggly-wiggly black worms to some river stingrays. A couple of the rays were quite shy and buried themselves in the sand as soon as they sensed humans nearby, refusing to come out even after the worms were phooted into their tanks. But one ray happily Roomba-ed his way through a bunch of them while I watched.

I also watched while someone fed an earthworm to a nine-year-old salamander. The entire process was very quick. Mr. E. Worm was dropped into Mr. S. Mander's tank, where the former sank gently down, coming to rest near the latter's maw.

And then-ZOOP! The earthworm was toast.

That salamander ate him up so fast I couldn't see what happened even though I had my eyes open and focused on the critters the entire time. It was one second: earthworm. Waaaaaaaaay less than one second later: no more earthworm. Apparently the salamander occasionally horks the earthworm back up only to re-eat him. Sort of like a dog would when he eats too fast.

After all that fishy goodness, I even got a door prize: four glass specimen jars from a now-defunct French company. They are no longer usable by the LNFU. In fact, the ones I got have never been used. Fortunately, the jars do just as good a job keeping food fresh as they do dead fish.