The Dead Sea Monkeys

(That fuzzy brownish-green stuff growing on the bottom and the green floating stuff growing on top...um...aren't stalagmites and stalactites; and I highly doubt either is supposed to be there.)

Well, it was destined to happen, but considering I got them last April, it probably wasn't the shortest longevity record ever set, but nonetheless, it was pretty devastating...

...my last Sea Monkey died the other day.

Now, I don't know if you kept up with my Sea Monkey blogs I did a few months back - if you didn't, you could always go here...then here...and finally here if you're interested.

I also don't know exactly what went wrong, but I'm willing to take a few half-educated guesses, and, as usual, I'm willing to share them with you.

First off, let me tell everyone that I didn't buy any of the gimmicky things they had for sale, like water purifiers, pumps and "executive-sized desk aquariums", so perhaps, by my frugalness, they were doomed from the get-go.

I did do some things, however, which might have, oh, speeded up their demise a tad slower than just chucking them down the toilet.

First off, the Sea Monkey people don't give you any instructions on how to scoop out the "dead Sea Monkey sludge" from off the bottom of the Sea Monkey container. Now, granted, it might have been addressed in the "Deluxe Sea Monkey Booklet" I could have paid extra for, but I didn't because I thought I'd be able to accomplish this menial task without spending $3.99 and another $3.00 for postage (or whatever it cost...I'm too distraught to actually check).

Sad to say, I couldn't.

I figured the easiest way might be to pour off the alive Monkeys into another container, but since the Sea Monkey container itself doesn't have the pointed/angled pouring spout like a Pyrex measuring cup...I probably spilled about 329 Sea Monkeys all over my counter before I figured out it wasn't going to work. They just dribbled out over the side of their home and, I, filled with horror at the thought of them being maimed in some way if I tried to slide them off the countertop and back into their happy habitat, decided "death by paper towel" would be much more humane.

It was, however, a noble try.

A less nobler try was the "suck them up with a straw" procedure.

Let me elaborate a little.

It seemed like, in theory, this would work. You get a straw, insert it down to the bottom of the container...which, by the way, has the plastic terrain equivalent of the Mariana Trench, i.e., it's not smooth and suck-uppable...and then put your finger on the top of the straw, and then draw their remains out, siphon-style.

Yeah, right. Again, this works ONLY in theory.

In reality, what happens is that you only manage to stir up the debris on the bottom and each time you try to pull the straw up out of the water, most of the water just manages to dribble back out of the straw. Then you are left with the agonizing decision of what to do with the mucky "yuk" you just removed and put into that Pyrex measuring cup (hey, give me some points for thinking ahead here). Do you then wait two hours for the sediment to settle to ascertain which specks are alive and which are dead...or do you just toss it down your sink...or do you do the moral thing and just pour it all back into the original container?

Yep...my morals won out and I ended up pouring it all back into the original container, thereby stirring up more dead bodies which probably really freaked out all the live Monkeys. In fact, this agitation action of the water alone probably killed another 128 of them.

But I tried. Oh, and remember the forethought of the Pyrex cup, too.

The last way to do it proved as futile as the other two...

...I found out that you cannot logically scoop out enough water, one tablespoon at a time, to catch all the live ones...what you can do is scoop out about 1/8th of a cup of Sea Monkey-laden water before you say "Screw this, it's going to take an eternity". I then tried my utmost best to at least separate the old water from the Sea Monkeys and, in that process, lost at least another 72 of them doing this.

At that point I'd pretty much determined it was best to just give up thinking of new and innovative ways to kill my Monkeys by trying to save them. I would just let nature take its course.

Well, at least tell us, Mariann, what exactly happens to Sea Monkey water that's been virtually left to evaporate over the course of four months?

The answer to that is: It gets very cloudy and the bottom of the aquarium, which has now become a Sea Monkey burial ground, starts to resemble some primordial Chia Pet.

Now, I'm not terrible, I was adding more water to keep it at the optimum Sea Monkey level and all...but after a while, it just seemed like all I was doing was probably creating a super-concentrated inevitable death lab of sorts, where, had I managed to keep them alive for a month or two more, might have had the chance to see some Frankensteinian/Re-animator thing happening.

As it just so happened, it didn't happen, and the last Monkey is now among the "rotting dead".

I'm not getting any ideas they will start hatching out of eggs again...but just in case there ARE such things as Sea Monkey Zombies...I think I'll let the water sit around for another month...or two.


You know...just in case.