raising a pet at CSHL

[Grisha Enikolopov]

When we were not working, we were exploring in the labs; we have this huge beautiful campus at our disposal, endless fields, hills for sledding, bike trails, your own private beach, volleyball nets, Ultimate Frisbee games going... and its pretty much just a huge playground. And so me and Ivan after school, we would hop on our bikes, pack a hardy lunch, usually consisting of a pop tart and some chocolate milk, and one of our adventures was behind the library out at the harbor, we went on this little peninsula and there were these mudflats and we found this horseshoe crab. And so we decided that he was going to be our mutual lab pet and we were not dumb kids so we understood that horseshoe crabs could only live in salt water so us being the smart kids we were, we brought this horseshoe crab inside into this little fish tank, filled it up with water and poured a lot of table salt in -not knowing how much- and it probably wasn't the best environment for him. We ended up giving this horseshoe name the name Crasher because he would keep on bumping into the walls of the fish tank and we thought that it was because he was a big angry horseshoe crab with attitude and we thought that was really cool, but about ten years later we realized it was probably because he was dying in that tank... but that was innocent fun.