I love having pets but unfortunately my timeshare cat Bumble (who you may remember from such blog posts as Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day) is currently living his best life with my parents in the Cotswolds. As much as I’m into our long distance relationship I thought I maybe needed something a bit closer to home and low maintenance. I briefly toyed with the idea of getting a mouse or something rodent-y but figured that would be a bad idea for when Bumble is around. In the end I settled on...sea monkeys!! The best pet you can get on Amazon Prime.
I ordered them a couple of days in advance and when they turned up they came with a surprisingly large amount of instructions. Turns out they need a 24hrs period of water purification before you can add eggs so it was lucky I’d ordered them early enough so I could then put the eggs in today and start my sea monkey journey.
Today I waited all day until the 24hrs were up and then put the eggs in (I managed to spill some in my keyboard but as long as it doesn’t now get wet I think it’ll be okay)! They turned the water pretty murky and gross looking but that’s as much excitement as I got from them today. That’s okay though, sea monkeys aren’t just for Love Your Pet Day they’re for life, well their life which is approximately a month.
I now need to just leave them alone for a week to hatch and then start feeding them once a week (already got a reminder in my work calendar). I did a bit of research into what exactly they are and incredibly they are apparently ‘man made’.
“Sea-monkeys is the brand name given to a species called Artemia NYOS (named after the New York Oceanic Society, at whose lab they were made).
They were bred from different brine shrimp species, then marketed as ‘instant’ pets. They don’t exist in nature.
What made them ‘instant’ is the fact that this particular kind of crustacean reached a state of cryptobiosis (almost like cryosleep in sci-fi movies, where a body shuts down for a period of time) when frozen, dried completely, or deprived of oxygen. They then spring back to life again when conditions go back to normal, breathing through their feet and drifting towards lights (yeah, normal).”
It slightly blows my mind that in the 50s humans genetically engineered a creature that doesn’t exist in nature purely as an amusement so that one day they could live on my desk. What a time to be alive.
Love Your Pet Day… 7/10 I haven’t had sea monkeys since I was a kid, when I vaguely remember they cannibalised each other until there was just one large one at the end, but I’m excited! Planning on posting sporadic updates as they hatch and progress.
Update: 23/02
They’re alive, tiny specks but alive!
Update: 27/02
Check out how many and how big they are!
