Marine Biology gone bad.

         None of you have any reason to know this, so I'll tell you one of the shameful secrets of my family.

         You see, one of my grandparents was a marine biologist. His daughter followed in his footsteps, as did her older daughter.

         In WWII, he had been working with "mine finder" dolphins, so naturally, when discharged, he had an intense interest in them. He constantly studied them ran experiments as to their intelligence, how they communicated, and how they transferred or resisted disease.

         Towards the end of his life, when his daughter (my aunt) began working with him, the earliest forms of genetic engineering and alterations had come through, in the science world. They immediately began to use this knowledge to further pursue their quest, and, in the end, ended up with a particularly healthy pod of dolphins.

         Well, of course, grandad eventually passed away, as we humans do. But my aunt noticed the dolphins remained in the peak of health, so long as they had a steady serving of gull meat in their diet.
         My cousin started working with her mother, and further testing proved conclusively that, if the diet was heavily and regularly filled with gull meat, the pod thrived. Further, if it was young gull meat, they actually seemed impervious not only to illness, but the degradation of the body would halt, and, indeed turn back, until they were at the peak of their health.

         One fateful day, however, they found themselves out of gull meat, and their supplier told them that he couldn't ship them more, for several weeks.

         Well, my cousin was a resourceful girl, so she went out to the sea shore, and started taking seagull chicks right from the nest. Once she had a bag full, she returned to the zoo and research facility she worked at.

         But two of the lions had escaped. They had been successfully tranquilized by staff, but were inconveniently sleeping right in front of the entrance.

         So she stepped carefully across the slumbering lions, and got about five more steps, before an officer of the wildlife commission asked her what she had in the bag, and where she'd gotten them.

         When she explained, she was immediately arrested for poaching, as it was out of season, and she had used illegal means to acquire her gull chicks.


         Which just goes to show you should never try to sneak young gulls across sedate lions for immortal porpoises.





punchline blatantly stolen, non clue who originated it, but it was just too good to leave alone...I filed the serial numbers off, changed the body lines, and claimed it!