Boiling frogs!

Yesterday was a day of deep irony in the Ingle-Warheit household.

Our only pets are two cute little aquatic frogs that live in a fishtank in our dining room. They were a gift to my husband a year and a half ago. As the most diligent and methodical member of our family, my husband is in charge of feeding and caring for them.

Cyril and Basil, our cute pets - hiding from the camera.

For the past year and half, Cyril and Basil seemed to be doing well - singing into the night, and cheerfully swimming around in their tank. But starting a few months ago, their companion snail died. We bought them another one - and it died too. And the frogs started to seem listless. They sang less. They swam less. We got worried.

Two days ago, my husband finally announced that one of them had died - but much to my relief, when he went to scoop out the dead frog, it moved. So - as the crisis management member of our family - I took a sample of the frogs' water in to the aquarium store yesterday to see if they had any insights into what might be wrong. Their advice? Check the temperature. African Dwarf Frogs are tropical creatures, and they like their water to be around 78 degrees.

So... I returned home and checked... and the thermometer read 94 degrees. We had been, in effect, cooking our frogs.

A few hours after frantically unplugging the heater, turning off the tank light, and pointing a fan to blow over the top, I got the tank back down to 78 degrees. Lo and behold, the frogs now seem much happier.

There are a few lessons we have learned from this experience:
1) don't trust the heater thermometer to do its job.
2) my husband needs new glasses.
3) look to your own metaphors for guidance (I used this as an opportunity to teach Elliot the word 'irony'):

I'm a Climate Reality Leader. I even helped our friend Naveen to create a 'boiling frog' sign for the Forward on Climate march in San Francisco! If anyone should have thought of checking the temperature, it should have been me.

But there you go. Sometimes, the stuff happening in your own back yard (or your own fishtank) is the hardest to notice - until it's (almost) too late.