The Babies Are Here!

After 5 long days of pacing, watching, waiting, doubting and research… WE HAVE MONKEYS!

Sea Monkeys, that is.

What the hell is a Sea Monkey, you say?  Please, let me enlighten you.

I actually thought they were made up creatures, like Shrinky Dinks or those little foam things you toss in water and they grow really huge but they are actually REAL live animals that you place in water and they hatch!  It’s a species of brine shrimp whose eggs remain in a state of cryptobiosis until met with just the right conditions to hatch.  Wikipedia’s technical definition of cryptiobiosis is as follows:

“Cryptobiosis is an ametabolic state of life entered by an organism in response to adverse environmental conditions such as desiccation, freezing, and oxygen deficiency. In the cryptobiotic state, all metabolic procedures stop, preventing reproduction, development, and repair. An organism in a cryptobiotic state can essentially live indefinitely until environmental conditions return to being hospitable. When this occurs, the organism will return to its metabolic state of life as it was prior to the cryptobiosis.”

Seriously, nothing is more awesome than that! Except maybe Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk or James Bond but these things are still pretty freaking cool!

These little monkeys have even been flown to space and back and still hatched.  If this doesn’t scream evolution to you, I really don’t know what does.  People should be so adaptive.

Anywhoo… so with the kit you get an aquarium (plastic container with fake pictures and bumpy bottom), a packet of water purifier (which actually contains the eggs and some other things to create a salt water environment), another packet of eggs (which contains more eggs and supposed magic crystals to help hatch the other eggs) and a feeding packet.

Technically they are supposed to hatch instantly when you add them to the water, but in our case it took a full 5 days because the water was too cold.  I really don’t know who is more excited about this, me or my soon-to-be-five-year old.  Tiny little shrimp living in plastic container on my kitchen windowsill?  I am all over this.