Sea Monkeys!

UPDATE: I decided I had enough to say about Sea Monkeys to give them a blog of their own. Please visit www.SeaMonkeyGeek.com.

It's spring and that means I get a hankerin' to hatch some Sea Monkeys. I was at Hip-Co with Bryna when I saw the new pink Sea Monkey tank. It comes with a little locket that you can put your pets in after you hatch 'em. I don't think I'll be using that. I just want to hatch up some Sea Monkeys and watch 'em swim around.

I've been obsessed with these critters since I was a kid. My brothers made fun of me, saying they were just pieces of paper that unfolded when wet, and my pets never got big enough for me to prove them wrong because someone, usually my little brother, always spilt the tank all over the carpet.

When the magic of adulthood hit, and I got my own place I ran right out and had sex, but after that, I bought cigarettes, okay, so hatching Sea Monkey's wasn't my top prority, but within the first year of being "on my own" I brought home a little tank. I didn't have to order them from a comic book and wait for weeks like when I was a kid. They now sold the Monkey's of the Sea in toy stores. My roommate Christina, much to my dismay determined that Sea Monkeys do not like vodka.

I've hatched up a batch every couple of years since. I raise them to full grown, almost an inch in length. They fight and make sweet love, and then they die. I've yet to keep them alive for more than three or four months. Keep in mind of set up complex reef aquarium systems and pretty much every other kind of fish tank you can imagine with great success. Doing things on the small scale has it's own challenges.

I'm going to wait until I can borrow back the USB microscope that I gave my nephew before I hatch my latest packet o' pets. I'll document the whole process here, and hopefully I'll get some cool microcscope pics to share. The goal is to keep the Sea Monkey's alive for one ful year.

And lest you think I'm the only Sea Monkey fanatic, the song Palace Of The Brine by The Pixies is about Sea Monkeys. Yup. It is. Here's a snippet of the lyrics

"i saw the cloning
of the famous family
i heard the droning
in the shrine
of the sea-monkey"