Creatures,  Hobbies,  Ramblings

Place Your Bets on the Limits of a Beast’s Appetite

It started with Esme, one little female betta. Now we have Esme, two loaches, four green tetras, four ember tetras, five shrimp, two gold mystery snails, a greenish-purple mystery snail, three purple mystery snails, a baby mystery snail who hitched a ride home on a plant we purchased, an unknown snail who is growing at an astonishing pace who also hitched a ride home on a plant, aaaaaaand 9,320,473,324 pest snails who must have been hiding on the plants we purchased for the plant tank. It’s just overrun with itty bitty snail babies. I can’t say with any certainty, because they’re still a little too small, but they’re looking a lot like ramshorn snails.

I’m about to say sad things, so if sad things make you sad, you’ve been warned.

I cannot kill these baby snails. I don’t know if Brian has that ability, but I’m going to say it’s unlikely. We cannot release snails into the wild, since that’s ecologically irresponsible. We also cannot have 9,320,473,324 snails in a three gallon tank.

Sope…

Welcome Douglas, our assassin snail. Brian named him. Apparently there is a predatory-but-friendly dog named Douglas in The Croods, which Brian has watched eleventy-hundred times. I should probably restate that Brian is my husband and not my six year old kid.

Hopefully he will get the mess of snails under control. I read that snail populations can get out of hand with overfeeding, but as I wasn’t overfeeding what I thought was a plants-only tank, it seems the water conditions were just lovely enough to encourage their hatching without my assistance. There’s nothing for it now other than some assassinating.

Title From:
Chairkickers
by Brown Bird