Of bonding shrimp and baby snails...

I have not had much time to blog and in fact should be in bed right now but here I am.  So!

For those of you who don't know, Mike and I acquired a fish tank in January and have slowly been adding to our little 'fish family' ever since.  First we got Wendell (a spastic albino cory) and Stache (an orange and black swordtail with, you guessed it, a mustache - or at least what looks like one on his lower lip).  One morning while feeding them I noticed a blob on the gravel at the bottom and was thinking 'what on earth have they done?!' when I saw it move.  I then realized we had a snail in our tank.  It is odd to realize there is unexpected life existing in what you previously thought to be a controlled environment.  We consequently named him David Copperfield in honor of him successfully performing a month long illusion and welcomed him to the tank.  We have since added 5 more fish to the tank: three guppies (Matisse, Zulu and Julius respectively), Queenie (a black balloon molly), Mr. Tuppence (a hatchet fish) and two little cherry shrimp named Don Julio and Tico.  We recently discovered that David felt that he may as well be adding to the tank too with his little hermaphrodite babies (I don't know where mama snail came from, but seeing as there are lots of snails cropping up now I guess we'll never know).  There are seriously lots of snail babies in the tank!  Thankfully, they like to chill on the red gate in the center of our tank (now named 'Snail's Gate') and its easy to pull out the gate and scrape off the snail babies (we're vicious, I know).

During this evening's scraping, David happened to be chilling on the gate and when we had finished scraping off the babies and were about to put the gate back in the tank, David (the sneak) was missing! We kept turning the gate over and over in amazement that he was really gone and then began checking the bucket we held the gate over during the scraping.  Nope.  No David.  We started scanning the floor and after a minute or two when I was beginning to wonder if we truly had a magical gastropod on our hands, I found him chilling under Mike's backpack strap which was on the ground nearby.  Don't ask me how a snail managed to move that quickly, especially an aquatic snail who was out of his preferred environment.  Maybe he was accidentally flung off in the process of scraping.  Or he is just magic.  I don't know.  We put him back in the tank realizing that he might be dying from having been out of the water for so long.  We watched closely as he sank to the bottom where he promptly put our worries to rest by birthing another baby snail the minute he landed on the gravel and crawling promptly away.  (Cheeky monkey...well, gastropod).  We realize the little blob may not have been a baby snail after all (hard to tell when its so small and lets be honest, I'm not an aquatic snail expert nor do I ever wish to be) but it sure makes the story more entertaining and it most definitely looked like a baby snail.

You may wonder why we don't just rid ourselves of David and no longer have the snail problem.  Until it reaches the point where snails are taking over our tank, David is oddly fun to watch (I know, I know, maybe we should get out more) and come on!  After both of the stunts he's pulled I think he's earned his place in the tank.

I guess I didn't get around to the bonding shrimp.  I suppose that will have to be for another time.  Goodnight world!