Crawdads in the house

At 2 AM last night a revelation struck me: I had left an active aquarium in my classroom.

Wednesday, I'd broken down my class for the year and walked out of my school for the summer. Shane had come with me due to a lack of child care options with Mom visiting Jama in Texas. My son garnered lots of oohs and ahs for his pretty eyes and damned cute demeanor. Away from admiring eyes, he was full of fussitude and stretched half an hours worth of work into two. This caused me to forget about my aquarium full of mutant fish and crawdads. I didn't want my classroom to smell in September from a bunch of dead marine animals marinating over the summer, so I drove up to my school to clean out the watery graveyard.

They weren't dead.

I've never had this problem before. My school aquarium has no filter. I put no food in it. It's supposed to be a self-sustaining micro-ecosystem for kids to look at and measure. Invariably, the heathens end up killing everything. Sometimes it's from tapping on the glass. Sometimes it's from eutrophication. Sometimes I think the fish are just sick of the students. No matter how hard I try, they always die. Last year, my co-teacher's kids were horrified at the mortality rate of my fish, so they tried to rescue some of them. All the fish died within a week of being put in their home aquarium (that had a filter and everything!). This year, the water turned green, the plants died, and I have mutant crayfish and guppies that refuse to succumb. Go figure. Of course, that was before I left them in a pitch black classroom with no windows to the outside world for a couple of days. At 2:05 AM I laid back down to a guilty sleep knowing I'd have to clean up fish corpses in the morning.

Imagine my surprise to find everything alive. There wasn't a single guppy belly up. The water had evaporated over the past month so that the crayfish could raise their claws and the tip would break the surface, but both Lefty and Psycho were left running around. They refuse to die.

The names?  Lefty is the big one with only a right claw. Psycho is smaller and equipped with both arms. He's also a murderer. He used to be in a separate tank with another crayfish, Victim. I came in to school one morning to find that Psycho had chopped off all of Victim's arms, legs, and one of his antennae. The poor bastard was just laying on the floor of the aquarium and would bat his tail around if poked at. That's no way to live (plus, I bet Psycho would've earned the name Cannibal if I left Victim in there), so I did a mercy kill.

I now have mutant crayfish living in my house. I'm not worried about them mutating further and escaping. The cats have been stalking the tank since they arrived.