Too many snails
Ahh, another bright and sunny Monday morning.
Even though I had a fairly interesting weekend, I am going to talk about snails instead. I have a fish tank, a small 5 gallon one. I keep guppies in it. Not the fancy kind with the glorious tails, but the little dirt guppies that are normally used for food for other fish. Why? Because they are fun to watch, require almost zero care and are very very hard to kill. In a point illustrating this fact, I totally neglected the tank for several months. Half the water evaporated out and the sides of the tank started to grow some light green algae. Finally, feeling sorry for the two fish that survived this ordeal (Probably by feasting on the corpses of their brothers) I picked up a couple of gallons of distilled water and refilled the tank, and bought another light bulb for the tank as well.
The light bulb and the fresh water just encouraged the algae and a little carpet of the stuff began to fill the tank. The guppies did not seem to mind, they zipped back and fourth as always, however no one likes to have a tank of green goo on their desk.
So the other day I dropped into petsmart to pick up some flea medicine for the cats. Like I always do I wandered over to the wall of tanks to giggle at the fish. Much to my delight all the tanks at that petsmart had a snail infestation. For serious aquarium keepers, these snails are a real pest. Once you get them they are hard to get rid of. I, however, was delighted to see them because it meant free snails! I waved a petsmart girl over and told her I wanted a half a dozen ghost shrimp. (33 cents a piece) Once she had caught them I asked her if she could throw in some snails as well. She gave me a look and asked if I was sure. I have a feeling their fish sales have been down because of the snail infestation. But I waved her on and she went to work catching the snails.
I took them home and tossed them in my tank and promptly forgot about them. The next morning I woke up, made some coffee, wandered into to my office and peered at my tank. Much to my amazement the water in the tank had become crystal clear. The snails had been busy all night, furiously hoovering up all the algae. There was just a little bit left on the side of the tank and by this morning that was gone as well. The tank is crystal clear.
My only problem now is I think I have too many snails. The girl gave me well over twenty of them. Now that they have hovered up all the crud, what is left for them to eat? I suppose I can feed them more and they can fight the ghost shrimp for fish flakes. Or I can just pick them out and throw them away, however I feel a little bad about doing that since they did such a good job at cleaning my tank. Perhaps I will start a snail-mail-a-thon. If anyone wants a snail let me know and I will mail one to you.
I visited the dump again this weekend to unload a load of bathroom crud that I had ripped down. It was the first time I had been to the dump when it was raining pretty hard. If there is anything worse than a smelly dump, it's a smelly wet dump. It took me a good twenty minutes to get all the broken tile chunks out of my truck. I was soaked when it was finished.
I had a can of she-crab soup last night that my mom had picked up at the whole food market. Mmm. She-crab soup.
Back To Archives