A crabby lesson learnt

One late morning, I was awakened by a phone call from Mr. Leung. Normally, a teacher doesn’t call a student just to chat or something, therefore, I knew immediately that something important happened.

What I was told was that 5 horseshoe crabs had died during the night. It was shocking news, not only because it broke our record of having the most deaths of horseshoe crabs in one day, but also because I had been on duty for four days including that day (but I over-slept!)

We believe that the mysterious death was caused by decay of the excessive amount of food shrimps which were not eaten by the crabs. The food shrimps must have been left for too long and caused bacterial production! A few days in the tank, the food shrimp can cause a large amount of bacteria as the environment made for the crabs is also suitable for bacteria to grow - oxygen pumped in for the crabs, at the same time, provides enough oxygen for the bacteria to grow; moisture is surely enough (man-made salt water). Moreover, the temperature controlled by us is always about 30 degrees which is the best temperature for all bacteria to reproduce.

A feeling of guilt was with me. Was it my fault by feeding too much? Or was it something else that caused the death of the crabs? No one knows yet.

Horseshoe crabs are weak at their larvae stage, so they could be easily infected by its surroundings. Horseshoe crabs are rare and we do not dare to loss any one of them. But as I just said, the crabs are still weak. There is still a high chance for more crabs to die. But from what I learnt, the only thing we can do is to try our best to prevent the same thing from happening again. In other words, solutions must be suggested.

As the old folks say “Every one must have done something wrong before”. So are we going to learn from our mistakes in order to do better? Or are we going to ignore the mistakes? To me, I would rather use this chance to improve myself.

I hope our team can minimize the number of errors that we may encounter in the program because the horseshoe crabs’ life is in our hands……

Chong Szi Yong