The first death we're talking about is of a 47-year old man who drowned in a lagoon at the same hotel we stayed at when we first arrived. He was a guest there and apparently drowned searching for his child who he thought was in the lagoon. We were saddened by the
fact that he died on Father's Day and we wish his family peace.
If interested, you can read the original article in the Honolulu Advertiser or in the
Honolulu Star Bulletin.
Our second death has to do with a tadpole we captured today. We observed a frog deposit a tadpole today into an axil of a bromeliad. We then tried to capture the tadpole for our research. We tried for quite a while and eventually gave up for a while.
We came back a little later and tried to suck it up w/ a turkey baster and when we finally captured it, it was not moving (and it floated on its back which we've never seen a tadpole do). We then tried to take it out of its container
to examine it further and we dropped it on the leaf-litter filled ground of the arboretum. We searched for several minutes and were about to give up when we found it between some leaves, dead. We put it back in the container and drove home so that
we could measure its size compared with all the other tadpoles we collected today. Once we got home we started measuring all the tads and at the end we found out that we had an extra tadpole in a container. It was swimming around and the container was not labeled.
We looked around for our dead tadpole and it was nowhere to be seen. We were convinced that we left it at the arboretum so we drove back and could not find it. When we got back home we looked closer at our unlabeled tadpole and remembered a red mark on its side which
we thought was a wound that killed it but it wasn't dead. It appears that it has come back from the dead (hopefully for a long time, but it still appears a little weak and doesn't move around like the other tadpoles)!
On a brighter note, we gotta tell you about a BIRTH. A pregnant woman was at the zoo with her children and wasn't feeling well so she went outside of the zoo to sit down. She'd already delivered 6 children and the pains that she was having weren't the same as in her previous
pregnancies. But the pain kept getting worse and she knew she was experiencing labor. At that very moment, a tourist who happened to be a registered nurse, was going to the zoo with her children. She saw the woman and asked if she was going through labor and the woman said, "YES."
The nurse barely had time to catch the baby before it fell out onto the pavement. A passerby quickly removed his shirt to wrap the baby and, as far as we know, the baby turned out healthy. We thought the story was funny because it turned out that everybody was in the right place at
the right time.
Alive and kickin',
Ben & Ashley
Below is a picture of our miracle baby! It's a little hard to see but it's attached to the frogs back...
