The Small One and I are the proud owners of some one hundred Sea-Monkeys.
Why is this sideways? Anyway, trust me, they're in there.
Remember the Sea Monkeys ads from comic books? Weren’t they great? The ad promised an amazing collection of merperson-like pets, smiling little guys with crowns and jovial expressions, all for animpossibly low price.
This must be the greatest print ad ever designed by a human. It doesn’t actually SAY you’re going to get pets that looks like that but it sure implies it. I also like the “DO NOT RESIST” command. I always found these ads fascinating but even when I was eight years old I knew there was some heavy duty bullshit in that ad. I may not be Yoda, but I was born with a health ydegree of skepticism. So I never got any. It helped that my parents would never have given me $13 for something adverised in the back of a comic book.
But recently the Small One and I wandered into a Mastermind store and they were selling Sea-Monkeys (the official trade name has the hyphen) so I figured what the hell. I wanted to buy Maddy something educational and everything else was too expensive. Also, when you’re tired of your Sea-Monkeys, you can feed them to your tropical fish.
Of course Sea Monkeys don’t look like people. They’re brine shrimp. (The Sea-Monkey people insist they aren’t brine shrimp, that they’re some magical species they invented, but they’re just crossbred brine shrimp.) Apparently many people with low IQs buy Sea Monkeys and come away really disappointed that they don’t actually look like Ariel. Seriously, there are actually people out there who thought the ad’s picture was the literal truth. When I wa Googling up pictures and info for this column I actually found a link to a CBC edition of Marketplace from back in the day in which the CBC guy intones, with the voice of a man discussing something that might actually matter, that Sea Monkeys don’t actually look like merpeople. If you ever thought watching or listening to CBC was an indication that someone is smart, I have video proof it is not so. Apparently some people are really stupid or harbour some weird ass slave fantasies, I don’t know.
So we brought the Sea Monkeys home and set it up. No humanoid-like animals appeared, but to be honest I was more impressed with it than I expected. It’s stupidly easy; it’s just a plastic “Tank, as you see above, that holds many ten ounces of water, and three little packets. On Day 1 you pour in a “purifier” packet, which I imagine clears out the chlorine. On Day 2 in go the eggs and salt, and poof, within a day or two out they come, and every five days you put in a tiny bit of algae for them to eat. That’s it. The kit worked exactly as promised. In a few days, the little plastic tank was full of live brine shrimp, and they grow fast; a week ago they were dots and now you can see the outline of their bodies and tails. They’re tiny now, but allegedly they can get about half an inch long. They’ll also start humping soon and making new babies; if you keep them around they not only get big but will keep replacing themselves.
You don’t want them to, though. Here’s what the little bastards look like up close:
Isn’t that disgusting? Maddy’s warming up to the idea of feeding them to the fish, so I figure this weekend those suckers are going for their last swim, before they get big enough to gross me out.
