It turns out for as of yet biologically unexplained reasons, a female shrimp who loses a single eyeball gets fast-tracked through puberty, her ocular loss unleashing a cascade of hormones that begets ovaries in as little as three days. This was not predictable, nor does it fit with some grand anatomical theory of shrimp endocrinology, but it is very real. And some supremely attentive farmer noticed it and began snipping eyeballs off by hand in an attempt to replicate it. Soon, the process was studied and verified in the lab, and although nobody could quite explain “eyestalk ablation,” the
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