Video summary: Tiktok by @pippabarnes - clips of a person with alopecia applying colourful makeup and other decorations to a bald spot as part of very dramatic looks, narrating now her relationship to her bald spots has developed over time
So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason weāre doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. Theyāre plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and theyāre missing it.
Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until theyāre big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when theyāre able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we donāt have a major crash in a decade or two.
The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).
The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.
But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who havenāt settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely donāt even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldnāt have been there otherwise.
do you guys remember when it came out that there was targeted sexual abuse & forced labor of transmasc & other queer perceived-female people at an ICE facility, and like it was very specifically "transmascs getting both sexually harassed, told to wear makeup, actively assaulted to make them act more feminine, while also being forced to do grueling manual labor & being directly told this was a result of them "wanting to be a man""? do you remember when that came out and then it was crickets from the community it feels like.
And now we have the community panicking about āICE targeting trans peopleā and itās likeā¦ they already did, you just didnāt care when it was happening to trans men of colour.
At the South Louisiana Ice Processing Center in Basile, detainees say they were forced into hard labor ā and sexually assaulted and stalked
āI was treated worse than an animal,ā said Mario Garcia-Valenzuela, one of the detainees. āWe donāt deserve to be treated like this.ā
Garcia-Valenzuela, a trans man detained at SLIPC, has alleged that, as part of the unsanctioned work program, [assistant warden] Reyes forced him to move heavy cabinets and cinder blocks, and to clean using industrial-strength chemicals without gloves or protective gear. When Garcia-Valenzuela complained of injuries from the work program, he said, Reyes and his associates forcefully stripped him naked and mocked him.
Kenia Campos-Flores, who is trans and non-binary, told the Guardian that they suffered from persistent migraines and chest pain after exposure to cleaning chemicals they were made to use during unofficial, overnight work shifts. Campos-Flores also alleged in a complaint they were persistently sexually harassed by Reyes, who entered their dorm and stole possessions including their boxers.
Another trans detainee, Monica Renteria-Gonzalez, complained that a stripper chemical he was told to use to clean the facility floors seeped through his fabric shoes and burned the skin of his feet. On more than one occasion, while Renteria-Gonzalez was bent over cleaning, he said, Reyes came up from behind and inappropriately touched him. The assistant warden also told Renteria-Gonzalez he was watching the detainee through security cameras, including while he was showering.
A fourth detainee, identified by the pseudonym Jane Doe, is a cisgender, queer woman who said that Reyes forced her to perform oral sex on him on a ānear daily basisā between February and May 2024, threatening to kill her if she refused, according to her complaint.
Doe, who was deported to the Dominican Republic in January this year, has chosen not to share her name or speak publicly because she fears that Reyes will make good on his threat to find and harm her, her lawyer said. [...]
āThis was a sadistic late-night work program,ā said Sarah Decker, a senior staff attorney with RFK Human Rights. āIt was designed to target vulnerable trans men or masculine-presenting LGBTQ people, who [Reyes] coerced into participating.ā
A cis woman was also involved in the sexual violence:
Twice, Renteria-Gonzalez said, Reyes came up behind him and touched him inappropriately. Another SLIPC officer, according to Renteria-Gonzalez, began to sexually harass him as well, sending him explicit notes and showing him pornographic images of herself.
This article includes more from each victim, but I want to highlight this part as well:
Garcia-Valenzuela had fled to the US in 2014 from Mexico, where he was tortured by members of a drug cartel. āI have no choice, thatās why Iām fighting,ā he said. āBecause I know that as soon as they deport me, Iām going to be handed over to the cartels and Iām going to be tortured and killed ā ripped into pieces.ā
But in SLIPC he faced a new kind of horror. He alleged that on more than one occasion he was told to move heavy metal filing cabinets back and forth across a room. When he struggled to lift the furniture, Reyes would taunt him, he said, saying: āIf you think you are a man, Iām going to treat you like a man.ā
In the spring of 2024, Garcia-Valenzuela reported sexual harassment on the basis of his gender, in accordance with Prea. He said he felt targeted due to his gender identity and wanted the fact he is transgender removed from his file, as a measure of protection. But an [ICE] officer responded that āeven if we take off your transgender marker, there is no hiding that you are transgenderā, noting Garcia-Valenzuelaās physical appearance, he said. To Garcia-Valenzuelaās knowledge, no follow-up investigation into Reyes was conducted.
Renteria-Gonzalezās complaints were dismissed as well, Renteria-Gonzalez said.
To repeat what was said above: we have the community panicking about āICE targeting trans peopleā and itās likeā¦ they already did, you just didnāt care when it was happening to trans men (and nonbinary people and queer women) of colour.
I'm gonna say it, I do think that even the laziest person imaginable should have a roof over their head, food in their stomach, and access to healthcare
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