Our seven babies have graduated to the point now where they swim up to the food and eat it themselves! It means feeding them a lot more but this is still a huge step up from before. They’re still under the watchful eyes of their parents but that’s just mom and dad doing their job.
Here’s hoping that someday soon, we’ll get a glean into discus genetics again.
Just like real discus, these two caring parents have stuck by the eggs since they were laid and are staying by them now while the fry grow up. Only 7 of our 24 eggs have hatched. 5 are female, 2 are male. Isn’t this exciting? It’ll be a while yet til we can see what the babies look like but we’re well on our way.
I thought it would be fun to break form for a little while and put each of the Pearlmaids through the classic IQ test. I locked and unlocked the doors accordingly and set them all in the bottom of the Docking Station Workshop.
Peter was the first in the hallway but Bibian blew past him and made it into the Meso first. Peter soon followed, then Bonrou, both of whom had become adults in the hallway. Trevor was next but got preoccupied looking at a door and Finny, now an adult, was at the bottom of the Workshop, pushing the norn puppet. I asked Finny ‘what’ and he seemed to snap out of his trance and head for the elevator. While I waited for Finny and Trevor to catch up, I moved the other 3 adults into Aquanornia.
It wasn’t long before Bonrou fathered three of Bibian’s children and, though she barely made it, she managed to lay all three eggs on land.
I had less good news for Finny and Trevor, though. Finny couldn’t seem to stop ‘approach elevator’ and Trevor seemed obsessed with the door. Finally, after Finny made it into the hall, Trevor did what started to seem impossible and made it through the door. With the death music getting ready to play, I started to fear the worst. Now all there was left was Finny.
He seemed to follow Trevor but passed anyway. Now, it was a matter of keeping everyone alive in this migration world.
Today we would continue Gareth’s lessons. He was quite a bit more stubborn than Hannabelle but he learned his lessons quickly enough. Once he’d learned enough about eating and language, I introduced Hannabelle again. Unfortunately, they spent most of their time slapping each other and hardly any at all exploring. I tried to get them to push the Science Kit power up with no success. Instead, they kept butting against the wall of the elevator shaft.
Finally, when Gareth was 50 minutes old, he wiggled his way into the area next to the implement and finally pushed it. He went back to the incubator area and seemed miserable. He had trouble eating and sleeping and so did Hannabelle! It was horrible to see them both so upset. The most logical decision at this point was to take a break and address their problems after some rest of my own.
