Time for some more fishy photographs…

This is Spot, the Snail. The big white one, that is. I named him Spot because he has a black dot on his shell…you can’t see it in the photo because it’s on his butt. He wasn’t born that way, I put the dot there so I would be able to tell which one is him. It’s sort of a paradox thing… the dot is there so I can figure out who is Spot, but he wasn’t named Spot till after he had the dot… time travel can be confusing sometimes.

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I just moved another half-cup of babie snails out of the nursery and into the big tank. Actually it was more like a quarter-cup but they don’t all stay still at the bottom. “The contents of this package may have shifted during transportation.”

The pic shows them and their cup floating around in the big tank, doing the whole “adjust to the new temperature and water” thing. I counted out thirty of them. With the sixty I moved over earlier, that’s 90 babies now in the big tank…. and over a hundred still in the nursery tank.

Once they’d had enough time to adjust, someone came along and tipped over the cup…

I tried to take a head-count of the baby snails. Just on one half of the tank, counting the snails on the walls and in view on the bottom, I got to one hundred. With about the same number on the other half of the tank, that means somewhere around 200 babies in there… Yikes!

I’ve started to believe my nursery tank is magic. In the last 3 weeks, almost everything that’s gone in there has thrived and grown. On December 13th there was Les the zebra danio, one or two baby corydora catfish who weren’t particularily doing well, and a handful of baby apple snails who were also just sort of hanging on. Oh and a little dying plant that consisted of one stem and a few suffering leaves.

Then I changed the substrate from chunky gravel to fine sand. In doing so, I believe I lost the corydora fry because they were hiding in the black gravel so I couldn’t separate them from it. Before removing the gravel, I had taken Les, the plant, and the handful of apple snails and put them in a cup, to spare them the trauma of the substrate change.

All that was December 13th. Since then, I’ve added two egg-clutches worth of baby apple snails, tossed in a dozen or so corydora eggs, and generally just hoped for the best.

Since then, the plant has gone absolutely nuts – the dying bit did die off but before that, it shot off a bunch of shoots and now it’s bigger than it’s ever been, ever! There are two corydora fry that are both over a half inch long – cute little goofs always snarfling about the sand, or relaxing amid the zillion baby snails who keep growing and eating and growing.

In the lower right corner, under the heater, there was an algae wafer there yesterday. The babies pounced it and destroyed it, now they’re going after the vacation feeder block.

You can see some of the babies are a magnitude smaller than others – they are from two clutches, about a week apart. The bigger ones are 16 days old in this pic, the smaller ones about 7 or 8 days. Lots of golds, and the rest are ivory. It’s freaky but with their light shells and light bodies, you can see their little hearts beating when they’re travelling right-to-left. All just a little mess of wee feet and tentacles. Very cute.

Oh No!

So when I got home from work, I looked and the clutch hadn’t changed at all. Like an idiot, I poked it and it fell off the filter and broke. Some babies spilled out but they weren’t moving…. :-O

I thought I’d killed it, but put it on some foam in the tank just in case. Then I realized they were moving! The babies were moving towards the water!

So I kept watching and there were more babies – the egg clutch was sort of hollow, as if they had been hatching inwards to the middle of it instead of outward. Now I’ve been sitting and watching the wee babies moving into the water – it’s amazing!

I even saw one go parasnailing! Fresh-hatched and it was parasnailing! It slowly went into the water then spread its wee foot out, let go, and gently glided downwards in a spiral. Tee-hee!

Babies!

Aaaauuuuggghhhh! I think the first clutch is beginning to hatch, but I have to go to work!

You can just see something ’shiney’ towards the bottom of the clutch – it’s a baby, with what looks like a yellow shell and dark body. After I snapped the picture I went back and looked and it was gone but there was another one, what looked like a white / clear shell and dark body.

But I gotta go to work!

Wah!