I underestimated kinks. Kinks are interesting. Kinks keep monotony at bay. Once the kinks diminish, there's no...fire! The burning curiosity to find a solution so you can move on keeps the bulb inside burning, keeps things fresh.
Now it's all routine. The counts are at half-hour intervals, the feeding every 24 hours. Uber thin tubes glued into the glassware making for water entry and exit. The tubes go from the tanks to the pumps, the pumps to the glass chambers, the chambers to the meter. The glassware rinsed with fresh, warm, distilled water with its flush-distill-flush-distill prep routine. Nets scooping up the scurrying tadpoles. 60 milliliters of aged tap water in beakers with five tadpoles weighing below 100 milligrams each poured into the little glass chambers. Six glass chambers neatly fitted into their seats on an iron stand, one set of tubes bursting out like a single spout of water from atop one set of glass arms. The hum of the now-running flow pumps. The water slowly surging up the tubes from the tanks, into tinier tubes hidden behind the opaque pump, into visible tubes flowing into the glass chambers, and emerging as dew droplets from their make-believe fountain heads. Pitter patter, plop.
Twenty hours later, the first recordings are drawn. Another in two. After twenty-fours hours, the flow goes off. And I watch as in each chamber, five little critters frisk about, from tube to tube, still hoping to exit their small, crowded (and temporary) lodging. I hope the meter can catch what obviously happens: oxygen depletion. Just to be sure, I put in five of them into one chamber, yet I hope they breathe fast enough and the meter is alive and kicking so it can catch the oxygen decline substantially well. Lower numbers make my heart swell.
Four hours later, the flow goes back on, running overnight. Pitter patter, plop.
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