“Fixing him,” Ellie said, with a confidence that should have alarmed any adult in the room.
Using the twist-tie, she anchored a small, clean bottle cap to a rock in the shallow end of the tank. She used the Lego tire as a weight inside the cap. Then, she used the rubber band to loosely fasten a single sinking shrimp pellet into the cap—so it wouldn’t float away. girl crush crawdad fixed
But if you dig into the story—one that has quietly become a viral sensation across the Midwest and Southern United States—you’ll find a surprisingly tender tale of empathy, childhood logic, and one very confused (but now very functional) crawdad. “Fixing him,” Ellie said, with a confidence that
This is the story of how a seven-year-old girl named Ellie, her secret crush on a boy named Leo, and a broken crayfish led to a moment of pure, unscripted kindness that has teachers, parents, and even marine biologists tearing up. It started in Mrs. Hendricks’ second-grade classroom at Maplewood Elementary in Lebanon, Missouri. The class had a small, 10-gallon “wetland corner” aquarium—a standard educational setup with a few minnows, some aquatic plants, and a single male crawdad (colloquially known as a crawfish, crayfish, or mudbug) named “Pinchy.” Then, she used the rubber band to loosely
Pinchy was the class pet, but he wasn’t in great shape. One of his claws—a smaller pincer, not the large dominant one—had been missing since a molting accident the previous spring. For a crawdad, a missing claw is not usually life-threatening. They can regrow limbs over several molts. But in a small tank with faster fish, Pinchy struggled to eat. The other minnows would dart in and steal his food pellets before his remaining claw could grasp them.
“He’s not fixed,” Leo told his mom that night at dinner. “He’s broken.”