Forces of darkness are here

Yesterday was a pretty crazy day for me, and I haven't been so busy for a while like the way I was on Tuesday. We carried an experiment yesterday and a practical class, this is something that shouldn't have been done on the same day.

The experiment we did is crossbreeding of catfish. This means that we have to produce some baby fishes by using two different fish (male and female) from two different locations and also having a control experiment by using a male and female from the same farm. We are trying to see which one will give better results.

Due to this, I had to leave my house as early as 7 am that day so we can induce the female fish (injecting her with a hormone so she can shed eggs 😉).

Another group was also doing their experiment at the same time as us (my group is A, while the other is B). Group B immediately had a problem before they started, when some of us arrived at the farm we saw that group B's fishes are no longer in the bowl they kept them.

They made a mistake by putting the male and female fish together in a bowl, obviously they are going to fight in the middle of the night and jump out from the bowl.

We picked up the female fish behind the farmhouse door and we were all looking for the male when we noticed it's under some old machines. The female wasn't so bad off, but the male is already very weak and looks like it might not survive.

We decided to salvage the situation by putting it back in water, but it wasn't responding much. That's the male they are going to use to fertilize the female, but now it looks like it's going to die and there's no other adult male around, which means we will have to give them some of ours. Forces of darkness at work.

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I went back to my group and we carried out the inducing by injecting the female with a hormone, and then we just have to wait for her to be ready to bring out eggs 🎉

Practical class?

Immediately after the inducing, the lecturer that was going to take the practical class arrived, just when I was thinking about going out to take breakfast 😩

He started the class, but instead of getting right to the practical, he instead was giving us theories we already knew. The practical is fish feed formulation, which means we have to mix different ingredients to make feed for fish.

We had to improvise a lot because we didn't have access to most of the equipment. The lecturer was still going on and on about the formula to use in making the feed, and most of us were bored out of our minds and some were sleeping.

After 2 painful hours, we finally started by first missing all the ingredients together, and then it was time to pass it through a pelleting machine. This machine makes it come out in pellets (something like peanuts).

Suddenly, the machine stopped working and we noticed the socket it was plugged to got burnt. The machine was too powerful and it ended up burning the socket box, and we haven't even started pelleting. Forces of darkness at work.

After some brainstorming, we took the machine into the farmhouse and tried to connect it to a direct wall socket, and hope it doesn't work. It finally worked and we were all happy, the feed was pelleting very well.

I was standing close to the machine taking pictures of the whole thing, and then I noticed one of my classmates coming close to see how the machine is grinding, but the problem is that she was coming from the back of the machine.

The machine I am talking about is the one used to grind tomatoes, which has a fan-belt at the back rolling at a very high speed which helps to turn the motor used for grinding.

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My classmate came close and her clothes got caught in the fan-belt, the machine immediately stopped working as it tried to roll with her clothes still stuck to the belt. It was chaos as everyone panicked and there was screaming when the machine suddenly sparked and got smoky.

One of us quickly ran and turned off the power switch of the building, and the machine stopped. We helped to disentangle her from the belt, and everyone was saying she was lucky that people were around when it happened.

We tried to start the machine after the whole problem, but it refused to start. Something has gotten burnt within the engine of the machine, everyone was frustrated coz we haven't made much progress.

That was when one of my classmates said "we have forces of darkness in this class that always spoil things" (I guess he is referring to the girl that got caught in the machine).

We ended up using a thrash basket to force the mixed ingredients through its pores so they can come out in "pellets". The work was very rough but we didn't have any choice, or the whole thing will go bad. We all contributed a lot of money to do the project, so we wouldn't want it all to go to waste.

We were supposed to leave it in the sun to dry up after pelleting it, but at that point, very heavy rain started falling 😆 we all concluded that there are indeed forces of darkness working against us.

Rounding it up

Yesterday was just like I said earlier; very crazy. A lot of things went wrong with the activities we did yesterday, and we failed at most of the tasks.

Group B's male fish finally gave up the ghost before they even have the chance to use it to fertilize the female, we had to give them one sperm sac from our male. But even at that, the whole experiment wasn't successful when I checked the " fertilized" eggs and saw that they are all dead.

As for the fish feed-making project, there was heavy sunshine today and when I arrived at school, I saw all the feed outside in the sun. But I have doubts if any fish will agree to eat that atrocity 😆

But at least there's a silver lining to the heavy cloud yesterday, which comes in the form of eating the catfish 🤗. After using the huge female and the 2 males, we had no further use for them and we shared them amongst ourselves.

As usual, I'm the chief butcher, so I cut out a huge chunk for myself 😉 I got home later that night at about 7:30pm and I immediately prepared pepper soup with the fish. I bought a bottle of predator energy drink to accompany the journey of the fish into my stomach.

I guess that was the only good thing that came out from yesterday, eating the fish of our labor 😂 I was able to properly have a rest at around 10pm, at that point I was too tired to do anything else but to sleep. It was indeed a stressful day.

Thanks @FarmGirl for the sponsorship renewal, I am very grateful for it ma'am 🤗

Thanks for reading 💖💖💖

Wednesday November 3rd, 2021