For our best girl’s fifth birthday we got her the coolest little ten gallon aquarium I’ve ever seen.  It has a daylight setting and a black light setting.  So the little neon tetras really glow as they zip around in their school.  She also has fish that actually glow in the dark!  Then I added a string of bubbles lining the back wall that have different colored lights and the fish love to swim in and out of them.  I confess my favorite though is this little clear shrimp.  Here he looks blue.  Meet Jacques Crousteau.  He spends his days exploring the tank and cleaning everything with fastidiousness and thoroughness, including the tiny rubber shark my little one added “to protect” the tank.  If he gets a fish flake his clear body will take on whatever color he has eaten.  And whenever he swims over the colored bubbles and lights it is SO COOL to watch his whole body, from the tip of his tail to the ends of his whiskers, go from red to blue to purple to green to yellow!  The French conservationist Jacques Cousteau, our little crustacean’s namesake, studied the sea and all of its life forms.  The famous explorer said this:

“What is a scientist after all?  It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.”

That is how I feel when we wake up each morning to study our little magical underwater world.  And everyday I feel I learn a little something new from our beloved crustacean explorer Jacques Crousteau.