Here is a photo of one of my snail babies, laying her own clutch of eggs. This little girl is less than 3 months old, and already she’s on her way to being a momma.

This was supposed to be impossible; I’ve read that they don’t start laying eggs till they’re at least 5 months old. Appearantly, this snail doesn’t know how to read.

BTW that white crud on her shell and to the right of her, is the remains of an older clutch that I hadn’t got around to cleaning off. This was always Shelly’s favorite egg-laying corner. Like mother, like daughter I guess.

The mythical city of snails, spoken of only in hushed whispers since time immemorable.

Or maybe it’s just my 38-gallon snail aquarium. You know, one or the other.

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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Newest additions to my aquatic menagerie are a pair of African Dwarf Frogs – little micro froggies that only grow to about 1.5″ long, they live their whole lives in the water. Cute little guys, they seem a bit lost in the big tank with all the snails.

After some procrastination and mixed emotions, I finally went and re-homed a bunch of my baby snails. The local fish store (LFS) had said they’d take them if they were bigger than nickle-sized. So I made a handy plastic jig with a 20mm slot in it, and any snail who couldn’t fit through the slot was big enough.

It took about an hour, rooting around the big tank almost up to my shoulders, trying to find and scoop out all the snailies who seemed big enough. Then test them with the jig, then separate out the ones who were going to the LFS from the ones I was keeping.

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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!