Sea-Monkeys Redux!

Some of you may have seen my recent Sea-Monkeys column, which was about my less-than-memorable experience raising Sea-Monkeys back in the early 80's. Based on some of the e-mail I've been getting, a lot of you can relate to what I wrote. Most of the e-mail was like this;


From: Qtyl143@aol.com
Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 16:14:29 EDT
Subject: (no subject)
To: goodnight_tonight@yahoo.com

i freakin love this!
i went through the same thing!!!!!!
i poured them into the fish bowl eventually,
Lisa


On the other hand, I also got e-mail from Sea-Monkey enthusiasts who proceeded to tell me more about brine shrimp than I ever wanted to know. DID YOU KNOW, for example, that Sea-Monkeys aren't really technically brine shrimp but are instead a close relative of them? DID YOU KNOW that they breathe through their feet? DID YOU KNOW they have three eyes at one point in their lives and then they shed one? Well, neither did I, but apparently Sea-Monkey fans like to send e-mail.

In that spirit, I decided to give Sea-Monkeys another chance and see how I'd handle the miracle of "Instant Life" as a lucid, relatively intelligent adult. I bought the kit you see above at Toys "R" Us just the other day, as well as the bottle of Aquafina to use inside it. (When I was a kid, I just used cold water from the tap; I guess you're not supposed to do that.) My kit is a "Hang Ten" Mini World set-up with a beach motif. They also had ones with "moon" themes and "busy city" themes, but I wanted my Sea-Monkeys to think that every day was spring break in their world.

I just added the eggs last night, so we'll see how the "Sea-Monkeys Part Deux" experiment goes. I'll be posting about it here on the blog...